Margaret J. McMaster

The Improbable Party on Purple Plum Lane

2011-09-13T09:02:00.009-04:00

Autumn descends. Nightfall comes early. Hallowe'en is approaching. And Hallowe'en requires a Hallowe'en tale. The spookier the better.

The Improbable Party on Purple Plum Lane takes Stewart to Mrs. Chairbottom's house for a Haunted House party. Except, there aren't any Haunted House costumes or Haunted House decorations. And no one seems to know when the party will start.

And yet ... strange things are happening in the spooky old house. Things that make you want to hide under the covers until Hallowe'en is over.

The Improbable Party on Purple Plum Lane is Book Three of the Babysitter Out of Control! series of early chapter books.

Reader reviews at Goodreads.com

Available at Chapters and Amazon and as an eBook on Kobo and Kindle.

Carried Away on Licorice Days

2011-02-16T15:32:00.018-05:00

Children's authors in Canada are blessed with outstanding children's choice literary awards. What makes these programs so special is that the children themselves do the reading and the voting - truly a win/win situation for both the authors and their young readers.

This year my children's book, Carried Away on Licorice Days, has been nominated for both the 2010/2011 Hackmatack Children's Choice Book Award in the Atlantic provinces and the 2011 Rocky Mountain Book Award in Alberta, and the children are reading fervently towards the deadline.

It takes a great deal of organization to make these book award programs a success. To start with, volunteer committees read the many titles submitted, and, after much debate, choose what they consider to be the ten most suitable. Once the libraries and schools have the books in their possession, groups of students meet with a librarian or teacher at regular intervals to bring the books to life through activities and discussion. Children are also able to post reviews online.

This process starts in September after the students start school and finishes in April when the children vote for their favourite books. Before the awards are handed out, the authors go on tour to meet the students and, hopefully, inspire the next generation of authors.

I have been thrilled to have Carried Away on Licorice Days a part of the children's reading experience and would like to thank everyone who has given so selflessly of their time to make the Hackmatack Children's Choice Book Award and the Rocky Mountain Book Award such a rewarding experience.

If you'd like to read more about Carried Away on Licorice Days or my other children's books, please click here.

Thank you for being my Facebook Friend

2010-12-18T15:45:00.006-05:00

In this week's column, Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente tells her Facebook Friends: "I love you, even if I don't know who you are. But you're really not that interesting. And to be honest, neither am I". She goes on to say that "self-disclosure is highly overrated" and "narcissism is the signature pathology of our time".

Many of my flesh-and-bones friends have these views. In fact, I did too until I asked myself what would make Facebook a valuable experience. For me, it boiled down to being part of a community of fellow writers. They are "Friends" because that's the term Facebook's founder, Mark Zuckerberg, gave them, but they might be more correctly termed "fellows", defined as persons in the same position, involved in the same activity, or otherwise associated with one another (Oxford dictionary). Of my Facebook Friends, there are probably fewer than five I know personally, although most I am familiar with professionally. Included in the fellowship are writers of children's books, crime novels, romance novels, and literary fiction. There are broadcasters, columnists, academics, and actors. By and large, their posts have to do with their current project, daily word counts, interesting articles they've come across, and, blessedly, little diversions that bring a smile and help break up the long, solitary hours of writing.

Mark Zuckerberg is Time magazine's Man of the Year for 2010. Margaret Wente makes the observation that Time's circulation has dwindled to 3.4 million while Facebook has 500 million users. Perhaps it would have been more significant if Facebook had made Time its Magazine of the Year. The point Wente makes is that people don't really care what Time has to say any more. They want to know what their Friends have to say.

I am one of those people that finds their Facebook Friends witty, inspiring, and extremely talented. It astounds me to learn what author Jane Yolen can produce in a day, what fantastic dishes Margaret Buffie has come up with this week, what lovely quilts Barbara Haworth-Attard is designing, and the trials and tribulations Giles Blunt is experiencing in his travels. Andrew Pyper and Susan Juby are wickedly funny. Paul Nicholas Mason posts the best YouTube videos. I'm grateful to them. When I was sick for two weeks with laryngitis and a sinus infection, I consoled myself with the Vicar of Dibley, which someone on Facebook introduced me to.

Even though I don't post regularly, I hope that I've passed along a thought or greeting or reference that touched someone. Perhaps, like life itself, Facebook is what you make it. I've enjoyed Margaret Wente's keen observations in her columns and books throughout the years. I think she would be a fascinating Facebook Friend to have, because my Friends are the best.

The Charming Quirks of Others

2010-12-10T11:07:00.004-05:00

A helpful thing to know if you're scrounging around the library trying to find Alexander McCall Smith's books, is that the author's last name is not Smith, but McCall Smith, so you need to turn yourself around and head for the McC section.

The Charming Quirks of Others is the seventh instalment of the Isabel Dalhousie series, a comfortable set of books you can read for their philosophical arguments without having to worry about impending distress. There is a little mystery to be solved but it does not involve police departments, S.W.A.T. teams, or the forensic sciences. Everything will be worked out in such a patient, civilized manner that the reader will scarcely be aware of it. In fact, many reviewers have mentioned that in this particular series of McCall Smith's, nothing really happens, and while this is not exactly true, it seems true. Part of this, I think, has to do with McCall Smith's splendid control, piloting the reader down a meandering river on a slow barge, with instructions to take in the sights and relax.

Alexander McCall Smith has been so successful in his writing that he could very well sit back and relax himself, but he maintains a hectic schedule of public appearances, and is, as his appearance at the 2008 National Book Festival demonstrates, a very witty and engaging speaker. This is, indeed, a charming man, with a charming book to sell.

Breakfast at the Exit Cafe: Travels Through America

2010-11-28T19:37:00.001-05:00

What happens when you put two of Canada's most accomplished writers in a car and set them off on a road trip through the United States for a couple of months? You get a book. In the case of Wayne Grady and Merilyn Simonds, you get Breakfast at the Exit Cafe, a fascinating memoir peppered with historical and literary references, not only of the states they travelled in, but of their lives as well.

They set out from Vancouver on December 21st, 2006 after Simonds' three-month term as writer-in-residence at the University of British Columbia expired. Home is a small town near Kingston, Ontario. They figured they could escape Canada's treacherous winter driving, take a languid break from their prolific writing careers, and experience American culture firsthand, by taking the southern route. It didn't work out exactly as planned. Canada enjoyed unseasonably balmy weather while bizarre climate-change patterns wreaked havoc on American roads; far from leaving writing behind, a book, this book, started taking shape; and culturally, discovering whether there is any "steak" at the heart of the infamous American "sizzle", proved to be a meaty exercise.

Grady and Simonds' trip takes place during Bush's second term in office. "Shock and awe" has proven expensive beyond even the wildest estimates. Having stripped its own coffers, the administration is borrowing heavily from China, and while the economy's official collapse is a couple of years away, grassroots' America is already as depleted as the soil on the Southern plantations. Eventually the electorate will take the keys away from the guy who wrecked the car, but at this point it is a mere speck of optimism on the horizon.

It is in this setting that Grady and Simonds travel the country as curious outsiders, assessing the state of the union, one American at a time. The pair are comfortable bedfellows, committed and tolerant of each other despite their dichotomies. Undeniably though, the Canada/U.S. marriage is more complicated, with Canadians prone to offer unbidden directions to the driver from the back seat of the car, and Americans, distracted and disinterested. Sometimes it truly is the steak that is sizzling, sometimes not.

Like all journeys, all good stories do come to an end, as, regrettably, Breakfast at the Exit Cafe does. But perhaps Wayne Grady and Merilyn Simonds could be persuaded to take another trip somewhere, someday, and let us all ride along in the back seat once again.

Changing My Mind

2010-11-24T11:14:00.000-05:00

When you are mentally ill, escape is on your mind most of the time. To escape the thoughts in your mind, to escape the people, the way they look at you, to escape the unhappiness of your life.

So writes Margaret Trudeau in Changing My Mind, a chronicle of escapes tempered with the reasons behind them. There are apologies for bad behaviour and hurts caused; recognition of two failed marriages and bewildered children; an inability to cope. When the history of your life has been dished out over the years in largely snide and snippy journalism, a book is a chance to tell your side of the story.

Surprisingly, Pierre and Margaret Trudeau were together only nine years. Margaret married too young; Pierre, too old. They were polar opposites trying to operate in a pressure-cooker environment. Postpartum depression from a rapid succession of babies went unheeded. A spell had been cast over the enchanted kingdom. Fortunately for Margaret, a couple of brave souls along the way had the temerity to suggest that she might have bipolar disorder. This gentle steering had a positive effect, even if treatment options were primitive in the beginning.

By no means is Changing My Mind the complete story. The husbands left behind in the escapes end up raising the children. Margaret's second husband, Fried Kemper, is dismissed very lightly. The years when Sacha and Justin brought wives and children of their own into the picture are dropped in almost as afterthoughts. In a book heavy with the retelling of Beyond Reason and Consequences, it is too bad. I'd already read those books. I wanted to see how the present was working out. Ironically, it isn't until the anecdotes in the Afterward that the book takes on a certain charm. And then, abruptly, it is over. Hopefully there is a follow-up piece in the making.

With Wings Like Eagles

2010-11-11T15:40:00.010-05:00

On June 18th, 1940, four days before France surrendered to Germany, Churchill announced to the British people: "... the battle of France is over. The Battle of Britain is about to begin." As a result, the period from July to mid-September, when Hitler tried to crush the Royal Air Force and bring the British people to their knees by bombing them to smithereens, became termed, "The Battle of Britain".

With Wings Like Eagles is Michael Korda's account of how 1,000 RAF fighter pilots and a population as pugnacious and stubborn as its leader, fought back under relentless day and night bombing attacks.

Huge areas of London including Buckingham Palace, the Parliament Buildings, Westminster Abbey, the East End docks, the area around St. Paul's Cathedral (except, miraculously for the Cathedral itself), blocks of office buildings and residences, airfields, radar stations, factories, and fuel storage depots, were pummelled. Although the cities of Southampton, Liverpool, Manchester, Swansea, Cardiff, and Bristol were also hit, London was bombed for 76 consecutive days. By the time it was over, 23,000 civilians were dead and 32,000 were wounded.

Author Vita Sackville-West and her husband, MP Harold Nicolson, watched the aerial combat above their heads from their famous garden at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent. They, like the rest of the population of England, grew accustomed to seeing things fall out of the sky: airmen, empty cartridge cases, downed planes. RAF pilots would be shot down in the morning and be back in the air by afternoon. Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding would not let his pilots fly over the Channel because he had no way of retrieving them before they died of hypothermia if they were shot down. At least if they came down over land, they could be put back into action. Heavily outnumbered in both planes and pilots by the Germans, the RAF could not afford to lose even one. Downed Spitfires were quickly patched and put back into service or salvaged for their metal.

It was a different world from the one we live in today. Linda Lear reports in her biography of Beatrix Potter that electricity arrived at Potter's Lake District farm in 1936, just three years before the war started. Television had not been invented. There was no penicillin yet. Radar was brand new but pilots didn't have it in their planes at the beginning, and what was eventually installed was rudimentary.

By September 1940, Hitler realized that the British were not going to surrender and the storms in the Channel were now too fierce for him to launch an invasion. The Battle of Britain ended. Although bombs continued to fall on Britain for the remainder of the war, nothing like those relentless bombing raids would occur again. In a speech to the House of Commons, Churchill acknowledged his country's debt to the RAF by saying, "Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few." No mean writer himself, Churchill won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953 for his account of the war.

In With Wings Like Eagles, Michael Korda makes the Battle of Britain come alive, with all the excitement, fear, and courage that was its trademark. Korda, who was once the editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster and is the author of many books, has an easy and engaging style.

Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter

2010-11-08T15:39:00.014-05:00

My curiosity about Lady Antonia Fraser started with the tour of her writing space or "Eyrie" as she calls it, at the top of her Holland Park house. She refers to her husband, Harold Pinter, occasionally dropping in and shutting the window, so it must have been filmed prior to Dec. 24th, 2008. Must You Go?, the title of her tribute to Pinter and their life together, is the question that he posed thirty-three years earlier that shook up their lives.

It was 1975. Harold Pinter was already a famous playwright and Lady Antonia was, and still is, one of Britain's most readable historians. Both were eighteen years into marriages with other people and she had six children. Apparently things were dissolved in very civilized fashion on her side with Pinter and her husband, MP Sir Hugh Fraser, hashing things out over drinks. By contrast, Pinter's wife, actress Vivien Merchant, refused him a divorce for years then drank herself to death; his son changed his name and cut himself off. Lots of relationships are dragged to their death by much less but Pinter was steadfast in his devotion to Lady Antonia and they weathered it through. His poetry to her alone is the stuff that makes the hardest heart swoon.

Professionally, Lady Antonia never took a back seat to her husband's career but her own prodigious writing is barely touched on in Must You Go?. She edited her diaries to capture the essence of the love story, focusing sharply on Pinter to whom she supplied copious support. It's obvious from the telling that they loved their lives together.

A lovely read like this is prompts further research. When I dug into Lady Antonia's life I discovered that she ascended from a talented and well-connected family: her mother, Lady Elizabeth Longford, was a historical biographer herself, and two of her seven siblings, Robert Pakenham and Rachel Billington, became authors as well.

No doubt comprehensive biographies of Lady Antonia Fraser and Harold Pinter are in the works and I will be first off the mark to read them, my appetite having been whetted by Must You Go? which leaves out a good deal more than it covers, but which is fascinating nonetheless.

Thrifty: Living The Frugal Life With Style

2010-10-31T11:12:00.013-04:00

Margaret Atwood a sheet-shifter? Who knew? Actually, I didn't know what that was until I read Marjorie Harris' book, Thrifty: Living the Frugal Life with Style. The writers, artists, and actors who contributed their tips to augment Harris' have clever ideas, from how to throw a party to how to pack a suitcase. Like them, I was raised in a DIY household where making something from "scratch" was a given and nothing went to waste.

Thriftiness is not to be confused with cheapness. "Thrift is so muddled with the idea of cheapness that it's a source of great irritation to frugal types. Cheap is someone who buys based only on price, whose life experiences are guided by price, and who would probably give up something sublime because it costs too much," Harris maintains.

I know both types well, having vacillated between them myself. At this time of my life, which I call the third trimester, I'm leaning heavily on the thrift side because I'm not about to give up the occasional indulgence for the sake of a dollar. I've also found the simplest pleasure in conferring with friends on how they save money, time, and aggravation in their day-to-day living. Over the past week I discovered that I've unnecessarily lost accumulated Aeroplan miles because I thought I had to take a flight every year when all I had to do was give over the card when making a purchase at one of its sponsor businesses. I also learned how to earn reward miles at the same time I'm accumulating points for groceries. Fortunately, it's never too late to learn.

For readers unfamiliar with sheet-shifting, it refers to the practice of taking the bottom sheet off the bed for laundering and moving the top sheet down. Atwood recommends getting rid of fitted bottom sheets for this reason. And for those of us who have more queen or king-size sheets than we need, these can be cut down and hemmed to twin-size.

There are, of course, too many practical ideas in this book to cram into this short space but there are a couple of web-sites Harris mentions that I'll pass along, such as www.couchsurfing.org and www.homelink.ca for free room and board when travelling. And if you want to see what a great idea, a sewing machine, and some ingenuity can do: www.theuniformproject.com.

Thrifty concludes with The Top 20 Tips for Living The Frugal Life with Style. Number one, and to my mind, the most important, is understanding the difference between a want and a need. The book handily covers how to satisfy the needs so that there'll be something left over for the all-important wants.

Storyteller, The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl

2010-10-15T09:16:00.004-04:00

There are 572 pages of writing. I didn't skip a word. All I knew about Roald Dahl when I started was that he wrote James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and that his wife, the actress Patricia Neal, had suffered a massive stroke. I wasn't sure the rest would be interesting. It wasn't. It was spellbinding. Author Donald Sturrock, a self-admitted neophyte in the biography game, held me until the last word.

At six-foot-five, Roald Dahl was a giant in the field of children's literature, long before it had any cachet. In fact, he had already achieved success writing short stories and screenplays for adult audiences but not to the same fame. He was of Norwegian stock, living first in Wales, then in England, and his father died when he was three. His education at English boys' schools was brutal and sadistic. His flying career during World War II was terminated in a plane crash that left him with headaches and chronic back pain for the rest of his life. His subsequent posting in America afforded him access to millionaires and movie stars. His life with one, Patricia Neal, was tested by the death of his daughter Olivia, a freak accident that almost killed his infant son, and a stroke that temporarily paralyzed his wife. After 30 years of marriage and five children, he divorced Neal and married Liccy Crosland, whom he adored.

He was a determined man in everything he did and a colossal pain in the neck when he felt circumstances warranted it. The book provides valuable insight into the tricky author/agent/publishing world and is a wealthy historical reference on British/U.S. secret intelligence during the Second World War. Interestingly, Dahl's daughter, Tessa, became an author herself, as did her daughter, Sophie, who is a world-renowned model.

Sturrock took pains to unravel fact from fiction on this famous storyteller. The research and construction of the tale are meticulous; his writing, inspiring. I came away from it wanting to read it again.

Bury Your Dead

2010-10-05T20:16:00.015-04:00

When you're reading one of Louise Penny's Armand Gamache mysteries you naturally want to eat. Her latest, Bury Your Dead, is full of aromatic coffees and flaky croissants. It is also replete with one of the most detailed and imaginative plots she's ever cooked up; or rather, three intricate, interwoven plots. In order to follow one of these plots it's best to read The Brutal Telling beforehand.

Penny has had trouble with readers and reviewers revealing too much, which is why I was careful not to read anything before I got the book. (Rest assured, there are no spoilers here.) In her appeal for discretion, which can be found on her blog, she asks the public to take into consideration that Bury Your Dead took her a whole year to write. Just a year? That's a remarkable feat considering the amount of planning and research involved and says something about Penny's discipline and drive. In the process, she has created an international audience interested in the culture of Quebec and its relationship with the rest of Canada - illustrating again that we need not be so sensitive about setting our novels in Canada. Readers will figure it out, just as they've figured out novels set in just about every other location around the world.

Bury Your Dead is meaty, cosmopolitan, and intriguing. Quebec City, which provides the setting of the central plot, is portrayed as the cultural treasure that it is. And indeed, that is one of the wonderful things about living in Canada. You don't need to go to France to immerse yourself in the French language and food and overall French-ness. You don't even need a passport. And Penny is doing wonders for Quebec's image worldwide while at the same time establishing herself as one of the world's best crime novelists.

When Your Best Friend Dies

2010-09-27T18:51:00.004-04:00

Finding Caroline was like placing a personal ad for an imaginary friend, then having her show up at your door funnier and better than you had conceived. Apart, we had each been frightened drunks and aspiring writers and dog lovers; together we became a small corporation.

So writes Gail Caldwell about her friend, Caroline Knapp, in Let's Take The Long Way Home. Caroline died in June 2002 of stage-four lung cancer at the age of forty-two. Gail was fifty-one. They were both writers who lived alone and cherished their dogs. After their daily solitude of writing they'd meet to walk the dogs on the path around the Cambridge reservoir; or they'd scull the Charles River. These fresh-air passions grounded them.

They'd met briefly at a party in the early 90s when Caroline was a columnist for The Boston Phoenix and Gail was the book review editor at The Boston Globe. A few years later they connected at the reservoir, referred to each other by their dog trainer who thought they'd like each other. Caroline's memoir, Drinking: A Love Story, had just been released and she was on the talk show circuit. If writers possess a common temperament, it's that they tend to be shy egomaniacs: publicity is the spotlight they suffer for the recognition they crave, Caldwell writes.

Underpinning Caldwell's artful words is the finely-tuned emotion of a parting that came too early and too unexpectedly for anything but the hard cry of sorrow. What makes this such an overwhelmingly good read is the story of Gail and Caroline's friendship, because not all promising friendships endure, and it's satisfying to read of one that did.

The Bag Lady Papers

2010-09-17T22:07:00.021-04:00

When Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme unravelled in 2008, writer, artist, and former editor-in-chief of Self magazine, Alexandra Penney, was one of its victims. She had been invested with Madoff's firm for 20 years, earning a reasonable 10% return on her life savings. Overnight, it was gone. Actually, it'd been gone for some time but that wasn't known until the financial meltdown when panicked investors tried to redeem their holdings. Understandably, she was thrown into paralyzing shock.

Penney started climbing out of the hole by writing a blog called The Bag Lady Papers, which has evolved into this book. The title refers to Penney's lifelong fear of ending up a bag lady. Reaction to her blog was not all sympathetic. Some readers snickered at her having to sell her Florida house, fire her housekeeper, and use the subway, and it's true that Penney had to recalibrate her privileged existence to live ... pretty much like the rest of us. Taken another way though, she had further to fall, and that can hurt the most.

The Bag Lady Papers is subtitled: the priceless experience of losing it all. Ironically, what Penney discovered was that she still had her education (which is one thing no one can take from you), her reputation, and supportive friends. These have helped her turn things around.

Although she takes the reader through her life before and after the fall, I wondered why her long-time companion and her son were largely absent from the text. These were odd omissions but did not detract from this story of a woman not content to wallow in despair.

Why Can't You Get a Good Cup of Coffee on the Queen Mary 2?

2010-09-09T18:05:00.015-04:00

Unlike the Italians, who are renowned for their coffee, the French cannot make a decent cuppa. With all those lovely outdoor cafes and scrumptious pastries, they've got all the visuals going. Why can't they follow through with the coffee? David Lebovitz, in The Sweet Life in Paris, can't figure it out either. Is it the type of beans? Do they roast them too long? Are they reusing them?

After I read his take on French coffee, I realized that I was asking myself the same questions after my transatlantic crossing on board the Queen Mary 2. Everything about this voyage was first rate: the food, the service (words cannot express), the room, the entertainment - I haven't stopped raving about it since I got home - but the coffee was terrible. It was sour, bitter, harsh. My mouth puckered when I sipped it. I wondered if they were making it out of seawater. I can testify that the QM2 chefs can make everything else under the sun (and I came home with the waistline to prove it), but a decent cup of coffee seems to elude them. Switching restaurants or ordering espresso didn't make a difference.

In The Sweet Life in Paris, David Lebovitz exposes France's idiosyncrasies in his easy and entertaining manner; as in the Catch-22 of getting a visa: you need an electric bill to get your visa, but you can't get an electric bill without a visa. Then there was the painter who wouldn't leave until he was thrown out. Of course, a lot of things that make you tear your hair out provide amusing anecdotes down the road.

I think that Lebovitz writes with the same intensity as Mireille Guilliano (of French Women Don't Get Fat fame) in trying to explain the uniqueness of French culture to the rest of the world. Actually, I get that part. What I don't get is why the French, and the QM2, can't make a decent cup of coffee.

David Lebovitz's specialty, of course, is food, and if you'd like to indulge in the food he talks about, access his web-site. You won't regret it.

Two Little Books of Inspiration

2010-08-30T16:45:00.005-04:00

Last weekend I was treated to a wedding ceremony in the park as I read two motivational books, The Power by Rhonda Byrne, and, A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Future by Michael J. Fox. I was sitting in my umbrella chair enjoying the breeze off the lake when a bridal party swooped in, had a lovely 20-minute ceremony, then swooped up to the Lakeside Pavilion for drinks and hors d'oeuvres. All were invited, they announced, but I didn't want to spoil my supper.

It seemed to me that Byrne's book reworked the themes in her bestseller, The Secret, but these are principles I heartily subscribe to. I don't think The Law of Attraction and the Power of Gratitude
originate with her, but it was good to be reminded of how they work in my life, even if it's in a subtler fashion than her examples. One that I seem to have mastered is visualizing the parking space I'm going to need as soon as I start my journey. This works even with the impossibly full hospital parking lot.

In The Power, she introduced me to something new:

If someone has something you want, be as excited as though you have it. If you feel love for it, you are bringing the same thing to you.

Be glad for another's good fortune, in other words. The universe will see that you are glad and will bring that good fortune to you. She uses the example of a single person looking at a happy couple and feeling love in her heart for their togetherness. This is something she wants, and by loving it when she sees it, she is attracting togetherness to herself. By contrast, if she views the loving couple with jealousy or anger, the message she imparts to the universe is that togetherness brings jealousy or anger to her, making it a negative thing - giving off exactly the opposite message that she intends. Food for thought.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future is Michael J. Fox's answer to the question: What constitutes an education? It is written like a valedictorian address, asking if the last dozen-plus years have prepared you for the future. Who knows? Life is a ride. Strap in, hang on, and keep your eyes open.

A high school dropout, Fox parallels his life schooling in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Future chapter by chapter through the subjects of Economics, Comparative Literature, Physics, Political Science, and Geography. He's not the only celebrity who didn't graduate from high school. Keeping him company are Leonardo DiCaprio, Johnny Depp, Robert De Niro, Chris Rock, Kevin Bacon, John Travolta, Hilary Swank, Jim Carrey, Sean Connery, and Al Pacino, as well as, some impressive billionaires: Richard Branson, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller. The point is, you can be smart and successful without being "book smart". (A look at all the "book smart" leaders who have been absolutely disastrous would make up another book.)

What is so admirable about Fox is that he has been able to take the events in his life, his triumphs and failings, and develop a certain introspection about them. Instead of making him a fighter, Parkinson's Disease has demanded his surrender. And, as he acknowledges, he's a better man for it.

The Postmistress

2010-08-16T14:21:00.018-04:00

Sarah Blake's debut novel, The Postmistress, has justifiably garnered many excellent reviews. In my opinion, it is the perfect book club selection, which is why it is going on the 2011 list. Set in Cape Cod, Europe, and London in 1941, two years into the Second World War and just before the United States became fully committed, the book is sure to evoke many memories.

In the trailer, Sarah Blake describes watching a postmistress in Cape Cod sorting mail and wondering whether she ever read the postcards coming through. This became the heart of The Postmistress: a decision to hold back a letter that was going to cause grief at a precarious time in a person's life.

Authors are invariably asked where they get their ideas. In my experience, ideas come from the "what if" questions. What if the mail wasn't always delivered? In what time in history would this really matter? What would the news be? A question I posed to my mother when I was a child and first learned about the concentration camps was: Why didn't somebody do something about it? For me, this was the most significant question Sarah Blake tackled and I thought her prose hit the mark.

Every Last One

2010-08-07T04:52:00.017-04:00

When you wake up in the middle of the night after a fitful sleep, you wage a debate within yourself over what to do. I decided to go back to the sunporch and open the sliding glass doors to the cool night and finish reading Anna Quindlen's new novel, Every Last One. When I finish it, I'm going to start Ayelet Waldman's Red Hook Road that just arrived from the library. Both these books involve a family tragedy. Having read the reviews, I know that Waldman's is set at the beginning. Quindlen's is about halfway through. Both writers excel at portraying family dynamics and internal angst. I wonder whether they live their lives at this level or are just extremely intuitive. How much do you have to bleed for your work?

My sunporch looks over our small private garden that is very black right now. During the day it is too hot and humid to open the doors. There is no stillness over four central air conditioners humming in the vicinity. Right now though, all I can hear are the night noises, mostly funny little insects that prefer to tell their stories at night, a dog that barks for fifteen minutes until someone lets it in, some light traffic in the distance. I think of my horse pastured down the road and hope he is enjoying the coolness before the bugs and heat start tormenting him. His pasture is located near the mushroom farm, which, at this moment, my olfactory glands tell me, is being aired out.

I'd read half of Every Last One on vacation, mildly wondering where this lovely family's life was going to lead, a little fearful that subtle clues were suggesting something ominous. I fervently wanted to believe that nothing bad was going to happen. But, having read other of Quindlen's books, I was pretty sure I was wrong. And I was. Something bad does happen. I'm at the part now where the mother is trying to cope with her guilt. What's happened is going to preclude the possibility of a happy ending. You wouldn't read it for that. You would read it to see how Quindlen does it. You'd read it to touch on emotions in yourself that might be dormant. You'd read it because you're up in the middle of the night.

A bird has just started chirping to let me know that dawn is breaking. I'm tired enough now that sleep might take. The roosters have starting crowing.

The Imperfectionists

2010-07-23T10:29:00.018-04:00

Again, while vacationing, I brought along my Kobo eReader and read

Tom Rachman's debut novel, The Imperfectionists, in record time. I don't think I'm imagining things when I say that I read faster with the eReader. Yesterday I read that eBook sales are now surpassing hardcover sales, so it would make sense for these formats to be released simultaneously. Still, some publishers insist on lagging behind a couple of months until they sell those hardcovers. I'm glad Random House didn't wait.

Aptly enough, The Imperfectionists is the story of the transitions an international newspaper out of Rome makes through the years as it's pummelled by the same outside forces pummelling the book industry at present. Rachman tells the story through the mini-biographies of people connected in one way or another with the paper. The effect is much like Paris, Je T'aime in that these little vignettes tell their own story and a much larger story.

Rachman is receiving well-deserved praise for this novel. He lets the story progress through dialogue and internal dialogue, keeping the description and backstory light. This technique gives immediacy and tension to the work and I have no difficulty adding my praise to that of the critics.

The World According to Garp

2010-07-20T09:46:00.000-04:00

At the time that John Irving's The World According to Carp was published in 1978, 912 followers of the religious leader, Jim Jones, committed suicide by drinking cyanide-laced punch; the serial killer, Ted Bundy, was captured in Florida; the world's first test-tube baby was born; and, Harvey Milk was assassinated. Jimmy Carter was president; the first personal computer, the Commodore PET, had just come on the market; and a little startup company called Apple was launched. If I looked through Irving's interviews I'm sure I could discover whether he handwrote or typed the manuscript but certainly there was nothing but a literal interpretation of "cut and paste" available.

You can certainly read The World According to Garp without understanding the social context. Yes, I was alive then, with a husband and two small children, and it was very different from life today. Ever conscious of his children's safety, Garp would certainly have his kids outfitted with cellphones; have a Twitter account that he'd update daily, then update again when he realized he'd been too flippant with words; never let his kids go swimming where there's an "under toad" unless he wanted a visit from Children's Aid; and harbour secret messages regarding his relationship status on his Facebook account. And the book would have been so safe and so dull.

Life abounds in The World According to Garp because it, like life in the 70s, was so serendipitous. I'm not the least bit sorry that I found this treasure now, thirty-two years after its publication.

Book News

2010-07-10T09:23:00.010-04:00

*** Camilla Gibb is back with a new novel, The Beauty of the Humanity Movement. She's featured in today's Globe and Mail and is on the cover of Quill & Quire. She's been busy behind the scenes for some time, serving as a judge for a couple of literary awards and working on the educational front, but for fans like me it's been too long since Sweetness in the Belly. I had the pleasure of hearing her speak at the Lakefield Literary Festival a few years ago and discovered that her dynamic writing comes from a highly-evolved mind. ***

*** Big buzz right now too for Tom Rachman's The Imperfectionists. The preview in MacLean's magazine was sufficiently enticing for me to put it on reserve, until I found that it's already available as an eBook on the library site. Obviously few people have discovered it yet, as I was able to download it right away onto my Kobo eReader. While I was doing this, I discovered that the Kobo upgrade is available which, among other things, makes it possible to change the font size of any download. Previously there was a problem with some eBooks coming from Adobe Digital Reader, but that problem has been rectified. ***

*** Bury Your Dead by Louise Penny, which is being released in September, is now available for reserve at the library, as is The High Road by Terry Fallis. ***

*** What has happened to the North American distribution of Must You Go? My Life with Harold Pinter by Antonia Fraser? There's a big hold-up getting it from the library or buying it on-line from Chapters/Indigo but it's readily available in the U.K.. I spent several moments fondly turning its pages in Harrod's Waterstone's store last month. ***

Making Toast

2010-06-28T06:29:00.026-04:00

"Amy Elizabeth Rosenblatt Solomon, thirty-eight years old, pediatrician, wife of hand surgeon Harrison Solomon, and mother of three, collapsed on her treadmill in the downstairs playroom at home."

She died on Dec. 8th, 2007. Immediately her father, Roger, and mother, Ginny, drove from their home in Long Island to her home in Bethseda, Maryland, and started pitching in, or more accurately, living in. Their grandchildren, aged six, four, and one at the time, were trying to cope with their sorrow and confusion.

I don't recall Roger Rosenblatt ever using the word "sacrifice" to describe what he and his wife did when they made this abrupt U-turn in their lives in order to look after Jessica, Sammy, and James while their father works. The way he describes his revamped life is in the spirit of attending to homework, bedtime stories, breakfast (he makes the toast), playdates, and the things kids say and do. His story skillfully weaves the history of his own children with the story of Amy and Harrison's children.

People dying out of order is accompanied by extraordinary shock and grief. When there are three young children that need tending to, there is no time to wallow in it. For Rosenblatt, writing his touching memoir, Making Toast, gave him an outlet to reflect on a beautiful person he wanted to give tribute to. In an interview, he remarks that he couldn't think of one more thing to add about Amy. His love for her is evident on every page and the reader is left in no doubt that Roger and his wife, Ginny, understand what family is all about.

The Harvard Psychedelic Club

2010-06-22T12:32:00.000-04:00

Before I left on a 7-day transatlantic cruise, I "checked out" The Harvard Psychedelic Club from my local library onto my new Kobo eReader. Fourteen days later, it checked itself in. I did all that from home. What a service.

If I didn't like The Harvard Psychedelic Club, the Kobo eReader came preloaded with 100 books and the Queen Mary 2 had a wonderful library, but no fallback plan was necessary, as I was enthralled with my eBook selection.

I'd wondered what it would be like to read a book from cover to cover (so to speak) on the eReader and how it would differ from a print edition and I must say that while it was a different experience, it was quite enjoyable. I don't think print editions are in any real peril from its introduction but it is a nice alternative, particularly if you live in a 700 sq. ft. condo and can't store many books, or are travelling, or you require large print. The ability to change the font size is a big plus.

I found that the size of the screen, and thus the amount of print that was revealed at one time, made it easier to focus on what I was reading and it went faster. As for the book itself, The Harvard Psychedelic Club is an examination of how four people from Harvard set in motion a revolutionary change in American culture in the 60s. The four people were Timothy Leary, father of the LSD movement, Richard Alpert, who would change his name to Ram Dass, Andrew Weil, now an M.D. synonymous with the alternative medicine movement, and spiritual teacher, Huston Smith. Even if you lived through the 60s and do remember them, you'll find this book an education from a sociological perspective.

imperfect endings

2010-06-04T18:51:00.002-04:00

The subtitle of Zoe Fitzgerald Carter's imperfect endings could just as easily have been, Where Is Death When You Need It? because, evidently, death is not as easily obtained as fate, chance, kings, and desperate men make it out to be. In spite of our best efforts to hurry it along, it behaves like a wilful, resistant child.

People all over the world pray for death to deliver them from all sorts of ghastly and painful medical conditions. In the case of Carter's mother, last-stage Parkinson's had eliminated any chance of a pain-free, independent life and the orchestration of her demise transformed it into a farce in the third act.

"If assisted suicide was legal, and we hadn't been forced to spend so much time worrying about getting caught, we might have been able to better prepare ourselves. To figure out what it meant to be here at this profound moment of my mother's life. As for her ... well, there's no doubt it would have been easier. She might have even chosen to stay alive longer if her doctors had been able to discuss her plans with her, and be there when she did it, instead of leaving her fumbling with a partially spilled morphine bottle, forcing my sister to step into the breach."

Carter's retelling of the 2001 event allows us to explore her rich family history and understand her reluctance at letting her mother go. It is also a treatise on an anti-aging culture that fails to treat human beings in a humane and dignified way as they deal with their imperfect endings.

The High Road

2010-06-02T20:21:00.006-04:00

A few minutes ago I finished listening to Terry Fallis' podcast of the first chapter of The High Road, the long-awaited sequel to The Best Laid Plans, and I can enthusiastically report that "I like it! I really like it!". You can pick it up on iTunes, or from the Terry Fallis web-site.

You won't be able to buy the book until September but you can listen to it, chapter by chapter, for free, until it's released. No doubt you're wondering why the publisher, McClelland & Stewart, would permit this, and indeed, it is the first time it ever has. It's not the first time for Terry Fallis though. He used the same marketing tool with The Best Laid Plans, guaranteeing himself a ready-made audience when he self-published the book with iUniverse. After it won the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour Award, McClelland & Stewart signed him up.

I won't give anything away but I will say that this first chapter skillfully reminds readers of the characters and plotline of The Best Laid Plans, with doses of the same rib-tickling humour, while it sets them up nicely for the mischief and mayhem to follow. I'm staying tuned to my iPod.

Nice Recovery

2010-05-30T10:19:00.014-04:00

I remember reading the first of Susan Juby's YA novels called Alice, I Think, and enjoyed it, but I have only a vague recollection of what it was about. Nice Recovery I will never forget. It is a triumph. If it were up to me it'd be on every high school curriculum and embedded into AA's twelve-step recovery program.

Nice Recovery is Susan Juby's memoir of her life as an alcoholic, beginning at age 13, and coming in for a landing at age 20. Its March Globe & Mail review recaps it nicely.

Although I am almost twenty years older than Juby and had none of the drinking experiences she writes about with such incredible candour and insight, I was rivetted from page one. What I could relate to, quite clearly and painfully, was the crippling shyness, deep-seated loneliness, and inability to fit in, that seared her to the core. Where you grow up and what your family background is really takes a back seat to a person's inner belief system. Not everyone makes it. Not everyone becomes a writer. Not everyone would want to take that journey back and peel off their skin for even one reader's sake. What more can I say? Buy a copy before they run out.

The Pioneer Woman Cooks

2010-05-10T19:50:00.014-04:00

I had to look no further than the recipe for Cinnamon Rolls to know that I'd have to do some hard ropin' and ridin' to wear off the calories in this cookbook. Consider: a quart of whole milk and a cup of sugar in the dough, 2 cups of butter and 2 cups of sugar in the filling, and 2 pounds of powdered sugar and 6 more tablespoons of butter in the icing. It's not surprising that there aren't any calorie/fat/sugar breakdowns because readers would be double checking to make sure they hadn't pulled the book off the science fiction shelf by mistake.

Nevertheless, the Pioneer Woman Cooks is a delightful bedtime read (as are most of my cookbooks). Ree Drummond's story about throwing away big city opportunities for ranch life with "the Marlboro man" is engaging and peppered with colourful pictures of rugged men and horses and cattle and her four children and rugged men. Oh, did I mention that twice? An accomplished photographer, Drummond took the book's photographs, which give it its eye-catching appeal. Everything looks absolutely yummy, and, well, it doesn't hurt to look (talking about the food again).

Drummond's career in cooking and cookbook writing started with her blog and grew from there. She's been a guest on Good Morning America and The Today Show and travels extensively for book-signings and public appearances. Which, along with raising four children, must burn off a lot of calories.

At the other edge of the spectrum is Mireille Guiliano's new release, The French Women Don't Get Fat Cookbook. In typical French fashion, Guiliano celebrates the slow eating of moderate portions of gloriously-prepared food. She's all about eating well but smartly so that the word diet is never part of the food vocabulary. She's the kind of writer who will tell you how to unclog your arteries after the Cinnamon Rolls. Her food is simple and fresh and integral to her philosophy of life. How one eats, she maintains, is as important as what one eats. She's very classy, and, knows several different ways to tie a scarf.

Calla & Edourd

2010-05-09T07:12:00.004-04:00

Kathryn MacDonald 's book Calla & Edourd is a beautifully-written portrait of the seasons of a married life through the eyes of a woman mentally slipping away.

As the candle burns down, past history becomes Calla's present tense. She relives a rich country life, attuned to the cycles of birth, death, and renewal in the people and animals and plants surrounding her. Patterns ebb and flow as she weaves through her story like a canoe down a stream. Underlying it, pushing it through like a current, are the back stories of the people she loves and the times she lived in. Included is a rendition of old-time farming methods that should not be forgotten.

This is a precisely-crafted story, rich in its language and character portrayals, gentle but powerful, and wonderfully fluid. MacDonald's skill with words and imagery inspires awe.

Published by Hidden Book Press

Congratulations ...

2010-05-02T13:07:00.007-04:00

... to Louise Penny for winning the Agatha at the Malice Domestic conference in Washington, D.C. last night for her novel, The Brutal Telling ... and to Windsor author, Patrick Brode, for his nomination for the CWC Arthur Ellis Award for his book, The Slasher Killings. It's been a great week for Canadian crime writers.

A Reliable Wife

2010-04-27T15:07:00.014-04:00

Goolrick, whose memoir, The End of The World As We Know It, is mentioned in my April 10th post, credits the "haunting, cinematic portrait of a small town in Wisconsin" in Michael Lesy's, Wisconsin Death Trip, for having "a profound influence on the structure and genesis of A Reliable Wife". The fire it lit in him in 1973 endured for thirty years.

In A Reliable Wife, wealthy industrialist, Ralph Truitt, advertises for a wife, a reliable wife. He has a past. So does the woman, Catherine Land, who answers the ad. Truitt is, like the landscape, frozen and wooden. Catherine is a passionate splash of red, tainted with ulterior motives. It is a novel of unlikable characters the reader can't put away, much as Truitt accepts his slow poisoning and anticipates the next chapter.

Madness was expected in the long Wisconsin winter. "Their husbands or their wives went crazy in a night, in the cold, and burned their houses down for no good reason, or shot their own relatives, their own children dead. They tore their clothes off in public and urinated in the street and defecated in church, writhing with snakes. They destroyed perfectly healthy animals, burned their barns. It was in the papers every week. Every day there was some new tragedy, some new and inexplicable failure of the ordinary." And this translates seamlessly into the microcosm of Ralph and Catherine's lives. Loss, death, and madness require a place at the table and war with each other over which fork to pick up first.

I imagine Robert Goolrick having a lot of friends; people who have sat with him through sweaty nights, talked about books over wine at dinner, walked through the snow with him to a concert or play. I imagine that hostesses love to entertain him; that he tells endearing anecdotes in front of the fire. I'd like to tell him that as Michael Lesy was an inspiration to him, so is he an inspiration to me; that when I need to be reminded of cleverly-drawn characters and concisely-crafted language, I think of him.

The Allure of Paper and Glue

2010-04-18T06:41:00.000-04:00

In my opinion, nothing beats walking through a bookstore fingering the paper and glue. This is what caught my eye this week:

The Postmistress by Sarah Blake

Bookclubs everywhere are adding this to their lists. Three women bring the war raging in Europe home through correspondence. Great cover.

The Other Family by Joanna Trollope

This week's Globe and Mail review makes it too enticing to pass up. Love the premise: a man's second wife naturally assumes she'll inherit everything when her husband dies, but finds out otherwise.

Imperfect Endings by Zoe Fitzgerald Carter

What do you do when your feisty, lovable mother, who is suffering and wants to end it all, calls you up while you're bathing the kids and asks you to fly cross-country for the event? A true story.

Nice Recovery by Susan Juby

Writing young adult fiction is one thing. Exposing the wounds that got you there is another. Kudos to Susan Juby who had the guts to tell us what it's like being a teenage alcoholic.

Too Big to Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin

What would be an appropriate subtitle? Cream doesn't necessarily rise to the top? Tom Wolfe's critique: "Andrew Ross Sorkin has written a fascinating scene-by-scene saga of the eyeless trying to march the clueless through Great Depression II." Required reading that will no doubt make me furious.

Around the World in 80 Days by Michael Palin

An appealingly-packaged re-release that will hopefully distract me from the painful truths in Sorkin's book.

Paul and Me by A. E. Hotchner

Hotchner writes about his business partner and friend, Paul Newman. A couple of decades ago, my ex-husband literally ran into Paul Newman on the steps of the King Edward Hotel in Toronto, almost knocking him down. Newman was as gracious as my husband was apologetic. Newman's eyes really were the most astonishing shade of blue, he reported. What else is there to know?

The End of the World As We Know It

2010-04-10T17:50:00.003-04:00

Robert Goolrick writes in The End of the World As We Know It: "This is what it takes to get me through the day: 450 milligrams of Eskalith, 1,000 milligrams of Neurontin, 2 milligrams of Klonopin, 6 milligrams of Xanax, 80 milligrams of Geodon, 200 milligrams of Lamictal ... Ambien to sleep."

Although he doesn't specify, these medications treat bipolar disorder, reducing the severity of manic episodes and fighting back panic and anxiety. Goolrick is finishing off the book when he makes this confession. The things he has written about are deeply personal. In a household of cruel eccentrics that refused to acknowledge the childhood trauma that cut him apart from the mainstream of life, he cannot fathom how the world kept spinning afterwards. He teases out the story in exquisite language, letting the reader absorb the people, the times, and the aftermath before revealing the event. Psychiatrists call it 'soul murder', a single event that irrevocably transforms a young life. A book worth reading for Goolrick's powerful rendering and brave revelations.

Stephen Leacock 2010 Medal for Humour Shortlist

2010-04-08T06:15:00.004-04:00

Click here for the finalists of the Stephen Leacock 2010 Medal for Humour. The winner will be announced the end of this month in Orillia. This is where a grateful world was introduced to Terry Fallis' The Best Laid Plans and this year's list has some intriguing entries. If you like to laugh, this is a great place to discover Canada's funniest books.

Amusements for a Rainy Day

2010-04-07T09:19:00.012-04:00

Authors reading and discussing their books at the International Festival of Authors

Lady Antonia Fraser in her writing room

Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir

2010 Canadian Championships Gala Performance

Middle-Aged Spread

2010-03-28T11:57:00.024-04:00

This is the first sign of spring for me: a foal born yesterday morning, his back legs so long and wobbly he can hardly stand. After sipping generously from the milk supplied by his mother, he collapsed in the straw.

Having been a transplanted city-slicker myself, I find books on the subject of moving to a farm very entertaining. There's the hilarious Letters from Wingfield Farm and Wingfield's Hope: More Letters from Wingfield Farm, written by Dan Needles, whose column is featured on the back page of Harrowsmith magazine and whose brother-in-law, Stratford actor Rod Beattie, stars in the unforgettable stage show.

Then there are testimonials like Marsha Boulton's Letters from the Country, More Letters from the Country, and Letters from Across the Country, with engaging adventures and insights. And now gardening columnist, Sonia Day, takes her turn with Middle-Aged Spread, Moving to the Country at 50, vividly attesting to the things that make you, and try to break you, on the farm. Property upkeep and home renovations are never-ending. Leaky roofs, animals in the attic, deer in the garden, and the enforced isolation brought on by giant snowstorms, try the nerves of even the most committed convert. But compensating for this is the scenery, the peace and quiet, the amazing generosity of neighbours, animals that are devoted to you, and learning that, in the end, you're capable of a lot more than you give yourself credit for.

Shadow Tag

2010-03-22T09:00:00.027-04:00

By the time the reader is invited into Gil and Irene's marriage it has become so toxic that Irene is keeping a diary full of imaginary lovers and hurtful taunts for her husband to read, and another, real, diary in a bank vault. She's an alcoholic who wants her husband to leave, while he schemes with gifts and surprises to make up for his violent episodes. Husband and wife goad and thrust, make love, make war, make up, start over, while nurturing the unrealistic expectation that their children will emerge unscathed. Think War of the Roses with more collateral damage: two people with knives slicing patches out of each other as they cannibalize their own flesh, with the reader as voyeur.

This riveting, haunting, masterpiece of a train wreck is something you can barely watch but can't take your eyes off of. Although Erdrich is a prolific writer, this was the first of her books I'd read and I was curious about her. What I discovered is that, like the characters Gil and Irene, she is part Native American, a mother, and the survivor of a similarly complicated relationship. Her husband, writer and educator, Michael Dorris, was the first single man in the United States to adopt a child and by the time he married Erdrich, had adopted three, all of them likely affected with fetal alcohol syndrome. How this couple had the energy to birth three daughters is anyone's guess but they must have been infused with it as they became professional collaborators as well. In the 1990s things changed with the tragic death of the first son and accusations from some of the other children of child abuse. The resulting investigation came to an abrupt halt in 1997 when Dorris committed suicide.

Do a lot of people get through that and emerge as finalists for the Pulitizer Prize and the National Book Award? Not usually. Most of us would not have the talent or the fortitude to take an old sweater that had unravelled and knit something new out of it.

Every Day in Tuscany

2010-03-14T10:13:00.029-04:00

In the movie Julie & Julia, Paul Child narrates over a street scene on his wife's uncanny ability to get the normally reticent Parisians to open up to her. This is still not an easy thing to do but Julia was succeeding at it immediately after the Second World War, when the suspicion that your neighbour might be spying on you was not that outrageous and the armistice with the Nazis was still fresh in everybody's mind. Loose lips were dangerous. Food was scarce. These weren't jubilant and carefree times. And it wasn't limited to France. All over Europe people had discovered that their homes and possessions could be confiscated by invading armies and their lives ripped apart. I remember as a child in Canada being warned by a friend's father, who'd gotten his family out with nothing more than a photograph album, that everything could be taken away from you in an instant.

Europeans are still grounded by memories of conquest and destitution. It helps to keep this in mind when trying to establish roots there. And, as the intrepid Frances Mayes discovered, doing things the American way can have unforeseen and troubling consequences. An alarming incident not only casts a pall over her latest book but more broadly over her life in Tuscany. Is it the same difficulty with finishing a bowl of soup after finding a fly in it that causes them to cancel an extensive building project at Bramisole or the downturn in the value of Mayes' investments? Maybe she's still mulling over that herself. Certainly this is the first time I can recall her contemplating the sale of her Cortona home or championing the livability of other locales.

I was shocked when she revealed that it's been twenty years since she and her husband, Ed, bought Bramisole. I've followed this story from the outset and give her credit for her ability, like Julia Child, to immerse herself so earnestly in her adopted culture. Like all of us though, our priorities change as we age. She and Ed have already sold their place in San Francisco and bought a farm in the American south where she grew up. Flying back and forth to Italy is a chore. And there is a delightful grandson named Willie who tugs at her heartstrings. Yes, things change. I suspect that Mayes' next book will involve a major one. Whatever it is, I'm grateful that she has allowed readers like me to walk the road with her.

Lunch in Paris

2010-03-07T13:47:00.004-05:00

Purely by coincidence, this week became a gastronomic orgy of reading. It started with Lunch in Paris, Elizabeth Bard's account of falling in love and trying to set down roots in a country vastly different from the United States.

Unfamiliar with the language, with no friends, relatives, or job to shore her up, she finds the unique French customs frustrating. At dinner parties one does not ask guests what they do for a living or discuss anything having to do with money. New friendships develop with agonizing lethargy.

Despite this, Bard carries on with youthful exuberance mixed with high expectations, not immune to the occasional cranky outburst: "Pastry aside, I hate this country and everything it stands for." She also reveals that she's tall and slender with a 34DD bust, clearly not qualifying her for the title of 'queen of gastroporn' yet but in keeping with the book's risque first sentence: "I slept with my French husband halfway through our first date." There was the promise of salacious, mouth-watering recipes, so I forged on and was not disappointed. Lamb tangine with prunes and roasted sweet potatoes, wild salmon with dill and cucumber salad, scallops with champagne custard, chocolate souffle cake, chocolate profiteroles, chocolate cream with creme anglaise .... My mind started to cast over where I might get some authentic French pastry in this town. (Sadly, I couldn't think of anywhere.)

Raised in an ambitious culture, Bard is not alone in her doubts about whether she will last in Paris, despite the great guy and nice apartment, so I was relieved to discover her blog Lunch in Paris where she reveals that she's still there and now a mother. Her writing/cooking career is developing nicely and all indications are that she's in the prime of her life.

KISSER

2010-03-07T12:51:00.006-05:00

A little girl is playing in her sandbox when she hears, "murmel, murmel, murmel," coming from a hole. She reaches down, and, to her surprise, pulls out ... a baby. She then spends the remainder of the book trying to give the baby away, finally handing it over to a trucker who has lots of trucks but no baby. This is the premise of Robert Munsch's storybook, Murmel, Murmel, Murmel.

Preschoolers look at me very, very warily when I start reading this to them, no doubt asking themselves, Is this for real? (If I were reading it to a group of adults, they'd be wondering, When does Social Services get involved?) As soon as the children start repeating murmel, murmel, murmel, they start to loosen up and suspend their disbelief. Clearly the little girl does what she wants and is not bound by stupid adult rules. They love this. By the end of the story, they're screaming for me to read it again.

Stuart Woods' KISSER. What a romp. Lawyer Stone Barrington weaves his way through a couple of interesting and not too outrageous intrigues, utterly exhausted by a succession of nubile women eagerly ripping their clothes off for him. This is one way an author can punctuate his plot but it can hold back the skeptical reader who is thinking: Is this the 80s? What about STDs? Does this guy get tested regularly? until, like the kids listening to Murmel, Murmel, Murmel, they suspend their disbelief and relax. Once they're in that place that doesn't abide by stupid adult rules, where anything can happen, (because, after all, this is just a story), they can sit back and enjoy themselves. And who knows? By the end of the book they might be having such a good time they'll want to read KISSER again.

When Reverence Must Be Paid

2010-02-26T10:10:00.028-05:00

It seems a pity, but I do not think I can write more.

R. Scott

For Gods sake look after our people.

Standing over the glass case bearing this final entry in Robert Scott's diary in the British Library, I wept. Having already read the published diaries, I knew that at this point the failed Antarctic expedition was down to three men, starving and ill in their tent, waiting for a storm to pass so they could get to the base housing their provisions. Still, I was not prepared for the emotional impact Scott's handwriting would have on me.

It is no longer necessary to make the trip to England to see the handwritten diaries since the British Library implemented "Turning the Pages". Scott's diary, and a number of original handwritten manuscripts, are now available on-line. Likely they won't trigger the emotional breakdown that pen on paper can evoke, but it's a wonderful site.

http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/onlineex/histtexts/scottdiary/

I had a similar moment a few years ago at the University of Guelph library examining the handwritten journals of Lucy Maud Montgomery. In my view, tribute has not been adequately paid to the two University of Guelph professors, Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston, who risked professional suicide to document Lucy Maud Montgomery's life, who interviewed her son Stuart before he died, as well as many of the P.E.I. relatives and acquaintances who have since died, and, rescued her journals.

If you only read the books Montgomery wrote, you'd be left with the impression that she lived a blessed life in an idyllic world where everything turned out peachy in the end. The journals tell quite a different story. To put it mildly, her life did not end on a high note. There are no journal entries at all for 1940; only one in 1941: "Oh God, such an end to life. Such suffering and wretchedness."; and the last in 1942, "Since then my life has been hell, hell, hell. My mind is gone - everything in the world I lived for has gone - the world has gone mad. I shall be driven to end my own life. Oh God, forgive me. Nobody dreams what my awful position is." More of the story came out in Rubio's book, Lucy Maud Montgomery, The Gift of Wings, published in 2008, postulating that Montgomery was still writing her journal but that her profligate son, Chester, who was living with her at the time and the subject of much of his mother's anguish, destroyed the pages after her death.

The brilliant Jane Urquhart somehow manages to get to the heart of the life lived and the life written in a neat little book for the Extraordinary Canadians series. Even if you came to it not knowing anything about Lucy Maud Montgomery's life, you would come away with the essence of it. Urquhart opens with a powerful rendition of Montgomery's last moments, laying bare the regrets, the recriminations, the memories, and the undeserved disappointment Montgomery took with her to her grave - a profound achievement in creative non-fiction.

Ten Thousand Lovers

2010-02-21T07:06:00.005-05:00

Today's was an exercise in compulsive reading; that rare occurrence when the book I'd picked off the mantle to read at the diner had to be finished before I could get dinner on. I wondered how this author had escaped my attention until now.

Like Lily in the novel, Ravel was raised in a kibbutz, transplanted to Canada, then returned to Israel to pursue part of her university education.

Ten Thousand Lovers opens with the sentence: A long time ago, when I was twenty, I was involved with a man who was an interrogator. From the start it's apparent that this is an understatement. It was more of an immersion than an involvement. Lily became the object of a man's utter and immediate devotion in a country in danger of becoming the monster it'd been running from and is afraid that this handsome Israeli is himself a monster. Is there no one she trusts, he asks? Can you possibly know who to trust in an atmosphere of this kind? This country plays the antagonist with such menace, the real question is not if the denouement to Lily and Ami's love is going to take place, but how. What remains to be seen is whether a "happily ever after" ending is possible for Israel itself.

Musings on Love, Busted and Otherwise

2010-02-14T06:43:00.006-05:00

I LOVE LOVE / (Except between 6 and 9 p.m., when I'm studying, and Wednesdays and Fridays, when I'm ironing or doing my hair.) (A sign noted by David Sharpe in Rochdale: The Runaway College, c. 1987)

It requires less skill to love than to be loved. (Robin Skelton, man-of-letters, May 1990)

Abusive husband, kicked to the curb. (Sign outside a house on the road to the highway. Yesterday.)

A neurotic collusion, I once read, occurs when the rocks in his head fit the holes in hers. That pretty well describes our marriage. (Fredelle Bruser Maynard, memoirist, The Tree of Life, c. 1988)

I believe that for friendship there should be similarity; but for love there must be dissimilarity. (L. M. Montgomery, My Dear Mr. M: Letters to G. B. MacMillan, c. 1980)

Old lovers go the way of old photographs, bleaching out gradually as in a slow bath of acid: first the moles and pimples, then the shadings, then the faces themselves, until nothing remains but the general outlines. (Cat's Eye, c. 1988 by Margaret Atwood.)

A wedding is the only theatrical presentation I can think of where the prompter stands up facing the audience and feeds lines to the principal players. (Edward Phillips, Sunday Best, c. 1990)

For a well-rounded education, you could try curling up with good books and bad librarians. (Richard Needham, columnist, The Wit and Wisdom of Richard Needham, c. 1977)

The Almost Archer Sisters

2010-02-07T15:25:00.018-05:00

A week ago Lisa Gabriele entertained a standing-room only audience at The Last Friday Coffee House in Leamington. Seeing that there were a few youngsters present, she felt she had to rework her reading so that the narrator, Peachy (a.k.a. Georgia), walks in on her husband and her sister, Beth, in the pantry, "playing checkers". Everyone cracked up. She's very funny.

Writing a book takes her a long time, she says, six or seven years, not counting diversionary forays into the Perez Hilton web-site, et al.. Of course, she does have a full-time job as producer of Dragons' Den (click on to see Gabriele's spoof of herself) on CBC television to manage as well. She's an Essex County girl, as am I, and since I was besotted with her first book, Tempting Faith DiNapoli (c. 2002), it was natural for me to be first in line for The Almost Archer Sisters.

I was grateful for the laughs that night. Our dog, Lucy, whom we'd had for 12 years, had suddenly taken ill and was hours away from that inevitable last trip to the vet's. Gabriele's book kept me pleasantly distracted as I dealt with my grief and I found the familiar landmarks comforting. I'd travelled my own road through Belle River and Windsor and Detroit, and, like Peachy, had married and borne children before I even knew who I was. Recently I read the sentence: Life starts when you step outside your comfort zone. I don't know who to attribute that to, but for me, The Almost Archer Sisters hung on it. The truth is that Gabriele, who has been neither a wife or mother, must have had to step outside her comfort zone to create such vivid and sympathetic characters. In the Q & A section at the back, she acknowledges that she wanted to write the book in the third-person but it didn't feel right so she switched to first-person Beth, then rewrote the book in first-person Peachy. If you've seen the movie, Amadeus, you might remember Mozart playing his composition in the traditional fashion and then hanging upside down and playing it backwards. That Gabriele captured her characters from every angle is just as awe-inspiring.

The Wisdom of Tuscany

2010-01-30T08:38:00.031-05:00

There was an article in our local newspaper recently about the health benefits of turmeric, along with a sidebar concerning the efforts by pharmaceutical companies to synthesize the key healing ingredient: curcumin. A much-needed voice of sanity appeared in the Letters to the Editor column the next day explaining that turmeric has been used for thousands of years in India and if people wanted to experience its health benefits, all they had to do was sprinkle it on their food. Sometimes you need someone to point out the obvious.

What if? What if there was a world where you were embarrassed if your product didn't last a lifetime? Where an $80,000 kitchen was irrelevant if you couldn't make a decent tomato sauce? Where doctors still made house calls? Where the most fertile soil in the country wasn't being buried under acres of plastic? Where waiters didn't care if you spent all afternoon at the table? How do you take the wind-up world and slow it down?

First of all you get your hands on a copy of Ferenc Mate's new book, The Wisdom of Tuscany, then you try not to die with envy before you salvage the important truths of what life can be like if you begin to think differently. Certainly Mate is not the first, or only, person to make this case, but he has Tuscany to back it up.

Mate is not an insular figure. He was born in Hungary, spent his developing years in British Columbia, and finally settled in Italy. His writing reflects a curious man, sincerely wanting to know what makes a life that works. I came away thinking that it's care. Caring about the land, caring about the people in your life, caring about what you put in your body. All of that care translates into quality over quantity.

On a free afternoon one day I happened to catch the Oprah show which had filmed the travails of an American family that had left behind its monstrous suburban home with its five bathrooms to live with a small, primitive tribe in Africa. Tender interviews with each of the children made it clear what enormous sacrifices they'd made to do this. Soon though the family was integrating into the daily routines of its hosts and one of the boys even formed a special bond with one of the elders. The parents seemed sincere about ensuring their kids knew what was real in life, beyond the hype and crass materialism they'd been delivered from. A tear came to my eye. The show cut away to commercial. I wondered if they were still in Africa. How many years had they been there? Oprah came back on the air with a follow-up on the story, letting the television audience know that after ten days in Africa the family had gone back to life in the States, transformed. I was stunned. Ten days? Ten days and then back to the five bathrooms? Is there any hope for the world? I think all of us need people like Ferenc Mate to show us that there is. At the very least, his is an authentic reality check.

Out of Mind

2010-01-22T23:34:00.019-05:00

Somehow Out of Mind, the sequel to Falling Off Air, slipped my attention when it was released in 2005. Catherine Sampson has gone on to write thrillers set in Beijing, where she resides, but these two books are set in London and feature BBC journalist, Robin Ballantyne.

I was so enraptured with Falling Off Air that I included it in our bookclub selections that year. It has an unusual opening. Robin, a single mother to newborn twins, is having a wind down at the end of the day, looking out her parlour window,when a body drops out of the sky and lands in the street. She races outside only to realize that her front door has locked behind her. Frantic, she pounds heedlessly on doors trying to get help. How could I not want to know how Sampson was going to follow that up.

When I conjure up the writers who brilliantly incorporate children into their books, with all the messiness and inconvenience they entail, especially with a developing love interest, Catherine Sampson, Rafaella Barker (Hens Dancing, Summertime), and Ayelet Waldman (The Mommy-Track Mysteries, Love and Other Impossible Pursuits) come to mind. These are the writers who can balance a child with a leaky diaper in one hand and a career in the other. They know instinctively how to mother as well as how to write and are not the least bit phased about a child wailing over an important business call.

Sampson writes catchy first chapters. Like something out of a nightmare dream sequence where you've got to run but your legs won't work, Out of Mind begins in a bucolic country setting with a BBC photographer who has witnessed all the horrors of the world, about to experience her own.

Robin Ballantyne's twins are now three years old and the crusty detective, Tom Finney, who investigated the case in Falling Off Air, is still hanging around, despite his lack of enthusiasm for the twins. The tartness of his reluctance nicely balances Robin's sweetness. Her first priority is her children and he wants to be part of her life, so ... Proving that opposites do attract, in fiction as well as life.

Great Britain produces top-notch mystery writers. Maybe it's something in the genes. Whatever the reason, Catherine Sampson is part of that pool.

Committed

2010-01-17T16:10:00.030-05:00

One thing I didn't know about Elizabeth Gilbert is that her sister, Catherine Gilbert Murdock, is the author of the young adult novel, Dairy Queen, the book with the lovable Holstein on the cover. Everything else I pretty much knew from her 2006 bestseller: Eat, Pray, Love.

I liked the "Eat" part the best but must have been paying attention to the "Love" because I know it cut off right when things were getting interesting with her Brazilian-born lover, Felipe. During her Oprah appearance Gilbert was vague about what happened afterwards other than to say that she and Felipe were still together. It's natural then that the world would greet the release of her new book, Committed, with unveiled and gleeful expectation.

Committed is a surprisingly fast read but in order not to be disappointed, the reader should go into it with a different perspective. Elizabeth and Felipe do marry but it's a shotgun wedding orchestrated by Homeland Security. Oddly, Gilbert doesn't question Homeland Security's right to arrest Felipe, throw him in jail, and force them to get married. Maybe that's the subject of another book. This one's about marriage from a sociological and anthropological standpoint and one reluctant woman's struggle to talk herself into it.

She does a good job of this. I could empathize with her disdain for the large, white wedding. I myself have always wondered exactly what they're about. Gilbert's research is largely anecdotal on this point but it seems to revolve around a woman's need to be chosen. The wedding is the "irrefutably public proof of her worth".

This section reminded me of a blog I'd read recently, a woman's outpouring of the grief she'd endured, months and months and months of unrelenting torment, trying to get her book published. She was physically sick with the anguish. "Why don't you just publish it yourself?" I wanted to ask her as she bewailed the heartache of rejection after rejection. The fact is, she's not alone. Lots of writers, very talented ones, allow their self-esteem to be repeatedly pummelled by publishing houses simply because they crave the outside validation. Over and above self-preservation, they need to feel chosen.

Even if a woman does find validation from her fairy-tale wedding, and I won't speculate as to whether it's possible because I've never had one, marriage, according to Gilbert's research, is weighted heavily in favour of the male, not the female. A woman's income, health, and life-expectancy take a serious hit, while her mate's flourish. (This may be why men allow themselves to be dressed up in starched collars and have cake pushed in their faces. They know there's a big payoff coming.)

Gilbert's exposure of Felipe and the nature of their relationship is careful. After sweating for months in a cheap Laos hotel room waiting for Felipe's visa, tempers are understandably frayed and conversation terse. Committed is peppered with interesting stories but not the exuberance of Eat, Pray, Love. But then again, how could it be?

Margarita Nights

2010-01-10T22:08:00.022-05:00

If I were a guest on George Stroumboulopoulos' show and he threw out the word "Florida" to me in the rapid-fire word-association game he plays, I'd immediately blurt out "cheesy". As a setting for a novel, it's almost impossible not to dress it in mismatched polyester and make it one of the characters. Author Phyllis Smallman, who divides her year between Salt Spring Island and Florida, a dramatic transition if there ever was one, is able to make it one.

The heroine of Margarita Nights, Sherri Travis, "is from the side of town where luxury is an extra wide trailer". She not only works as a bartender but loves bars, cadging cigarettes from her friend, Marley, and rescuing her friends from themselves - not unlike bounty hunter, Stephanie Plum, or private detective, Kinsey Millhone. Her mother, Ruth Ann, whom she hasn't quite forgiven for preferring men to motherhood, provides a memorably hysterical scene involving a black negligee and a thong.

With a novel this big on caricature, one might expect the plot to be more runny than hard-boiled. No matter. It might not be meaty but it's got a heart of gold. Sherri's no-good husband, whom she neglected to divorce, has allegedly been blown to bits on his boat. The good news, and the bad news, is that Sherri is the recipient of his insurance policy. Motive and opportunity make it incumbent upon her to clear her name without getting hurt.

Margarita Nights was the first recipient of the Unhanged Arthur Ellis Award created by Louise Penny and sponsored by publisher McArthur and Company, and was shortlisted for the 2009 Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel. Smallman has pursued Sherri Travis with Sex in a Sidecar (2009) and A Brewski for the Old Man which is due out in March of this year.

Heat Wave

2010-01-02T16:27:00.018-05:00

If you watch the television show Castle, you're familiar with the plot: a rich and famous mystery writer tags along with Detective Kate Beckett in order to get his facts straight on police procedures for a book he's writing entitled, Heat Wave. Most viewers were surprised when the book was launched on the show and simultaneously made its way to their local bookstores. I know I was intrigued. Bloggers are speculating as to who wrote it, with James Patterson, whose endorsement appears on the front cover, as one of the candidates. It could be. The writers for the show: Andrew W. Marlowe, Charles Murray, Barry Schindel, and David Grae, are also candidates. The book's "voice" is very much like the show's and the characters are synchronized even if their names have changed ("Castle", for example, becomes "Rook"). I thought it was a spirited read with lots of good-natured, slingshot humour, and an engaging plot.

This is not the first time a series of books has been spun off a TV series. Remember Murder, She Wrote? Jessica Fletcher, as fictional a character as Richard Castle, also wrote her own series. She shared credit with Donald Bain though, so it wasn't such a stretch figuring out who did the writing.

Murder, She Wrote was a charming show whose reruns are still on cable. Unfortunately, in an effort to give guest stars top billing, they were usually cast as the murderer, taking the fun out of the guessing. Racked up beside the ultra-slick Castle, the episodes have a certain dowdiness about them now but the quaint seriousness of amateur sleuth, Jessica Fletcher, keeps people watching.

Any of the TV shows I enjoy are quickly axed, so I'm really hoping that Heat Wave makes enough money to keep Castle on the air. At least for a couple more seasons.

Italy, on a little red walker

2009-12-24T07:12:00.023-05:00

It's not likely that Italy's Ministry of Tourism will be endorsing Jane Christmas' Incontinent on the Continent any time soon, and not just because it reveals how inaccessible Italy is for people with disabilities, but for its expose on the poor food and hostile service staff.

A film maker could take Incontinent on the Continent and turn it into something like Chevy Chase's European Vacation. There is a certain absurdity in the premise - travelling to an inhospitable country with an infirm mother, while trying to patch up a rocky relationship - that could be worked up into credible slapstick. As a book though, the reader must be prepared for a morose confrontation of how bodies fail us in old age and the bravery required to maintain one's dignity in the face of it.

Incontinent on the Continent is a travel drama. There are no hotels, restaurants, sights, or quaint towns you'll want to visit after reading it. It rained the whole time, the meals were wretched, the hotels crummy, and the tourist attractions awful. Awful, awful, awful Italy. Nobody in their right mind would want to duplicate this trip.

My teeth were on edge for much of the book, wanting to explain to Jane Christmas that the trick to travelling with seniors is to keep it short, a week and a half at the most, plunk yourself down in one spot for the duration, inside a hotel with elevators and a nice restaurant, give over half of each day for rest, and don't expect to visit every tourist trap in the country. True, she would have had a much better trip this way, but the fodder for the book would have been lost.

In fairness to Italy as a holiday destination, here are my guest book comments from my 2004 trip to Umbria:

Our 7 days in Umbria were happily spent at Casa Tanaquilla with Stefania and Marco, the most gracious of hosts. The apartment was spacious, private, and well-equipped; the views indescribable. Panicale itself is an unspoiled jewel and perfect for enjoying authentic village life without masses of tourists. When the shops close down in the afternoon neighbours congregate in the piazza to visit and take refreshment at Gallo's Bar. If you haven't already had your hot chocolate and pastries, this is a good time to sit and watch the town go by. We enjoyed two wonderful dinners at Ristorante Masolino and can highly recommend their lamb chops and beef filet, tender enough to be cut with a fork. The antipasto at Le Grotte di Boldrino highlighted our lunch there.

Panicale proved to be a hub for adventures to other Umbrian locales. Tavarnelle has a Monday market and a supermarket adjacent to it. Stock up here on wine if you're planning on taking any home with you. You'll never see those prices again. Perugia hosts the magnificent Eurochocolate festival in the walled city with exhibits and lots of chocolate to buy. The hot chocolate is just that: molten chocolate. There are good clothing stores here and everything in Umbria is less expensive than in Tuscany. But you will want to check out at least two towns in Tuscany: Cortona, made famous by Frances Mayes' books, "Under the Tuscan Sun" and "Bella Tuscany", and Montepulciano, the setting of Ferenc Mate's "A Reasonable Life" and "The Hills of Tuscany" . Both are worth the short drive from Panicale. Cortona sports little art galleries featuring Tuscan landscapes and the fabulous restaurant, Osteria del Teatro, where the waiter shaves chocolate off huge slabs to finish off your meal. On the way to Montepulciano, cut off at Chiusi for a little side trip to the lake through nurseries growing infant cypress trees. We took away from our visit the superb taste of the food, fresh and flavourful whether it was from the grocery store or a restaurant; the peaceful lives of the native Italians; the gorgeous scenery and the well-preserved medieval towns. It was everything we imagined it would be, without disappointment.

When the Chips are Down

2009-12-18T20:42:00.016-05:00

Chocolate chips, that is. Lots of chocolate chips. Just how much, I'm not quite sure because Nigella dumps two packages into the cookie dough without elaborating on size. I sprinkled in about a cup and a half of the small dark chocolate chips found in the bulk food section of the grocery store which I find sweeter and less waxy-tasting than the packaged variety. Surprisingly, for all the chocolate in Nigella's Totally Chocolate Chip cookies, they are not sickeningly sweet. In fact, they went over rather well at the bookclub Christmas party. I would rethink turning them out with an ice cream scoop though as the resulting cookies are enormous.

Here is my take on the recipe for those of us on the other side of the pond.

Melt a 100 g. bar of 70% dark chocolate in a bowl over boiling water then set aside to cool a bit.

Cream together 1/2 c. soft butter, 1/3 c. light brown sugar, and 1/4 c. white sugar.

In a separate bowl combine: 2/3 c. flour, 2 tbsp. cocoa, 1 tsp. baking soda, and 1/2 tsp. salt, then stir it into the butter mixture. Add melted chocolate, 1 tsp. vanilla and 1 cold egg. To finish off, stir in 1 1/2 c. chocolate chips. This is a moist batter.

Spoon onto a cookie sheet and bake at 350 for 18 minutes.

In the world of cook books, where recipes are copied and modified on a regular basis, the list of ingredients and their measure is

not subject to copyright. The preparation instructions may be, however. In a book such as Nigella Lawson's How To Eat where there is more talking than actual cooking, the text would be under copyright protection. Aunt Emily's brownie recipe is likely not. Neither is my Banana Chocolate Chip Bran Muffin recipe which produces light, moist muffins that are actually pretty nutritious.

Combine 1/4 c. vegetable oil, 3 tbsp. molasses, 1 large egg, 1 mashed banana, 1 tsp. vanilla extract, 1/2 c. fat-free yogurt, and 1/3 c. skim milk.

In a separate bowl, stir together: 1/2 c. natural wheat bran, 3/4 c. whole wheat flour, 1/3 c. white flour, 3/4 c. Splenda, 1 1/2 tsp. baking powder, 1/2 tsp. baking soda, 1 tsp. pumpkin pie spice, 1/8 tsp. salt, and 2/3 c. chocolate chips.

Add to the oil mixture and mix only until combined.

Spray a 12-cup muffin tin with vegetable oil and preheat the oven to 375.

Now is the time for the ice cream scoop! It makes loading up the muffin cups easier and the muffins turn out uniform in size.

Bake for 20 minutes or until the tops are firm to the touch.

This should really segue into a book discussion, but all this talk of chocolate chips has made me hungry and we're all too busy to read anyway right now, so Merry Christmas and pass the eggnog!

Cheers, Nigella!

2009-12-10T22:35:00.020-05:00

There's something wonderful about a woman who can slap 16 tablespoons of butter into crepe suzettes without worrying about the consequences. Some of us are guilt-ridden over much smaller things, let alone able to put on a happy face in the kitchen. This, and the fact that she is extraordinarily articulate, is why I adore Nigella Lawson. She exudes confidence and joy and doesn't give a fig about calories or cholesterol. But, for the record, both Julia Child and her husband lived into their 90s on butter-rich food, so I'm hoping for the best as far as Nigella is concerned.

Fortunately for the library bookclub members, they're going to be treated to Nigella's Totally Chocolate Chip Cookies which I discovered on YouTube. Watching Nigella cook is almost as pleasurable as eating. The cookies look so chocolatey (cocoa, melted chocolate, and chocolate chips), that I wrote down the measurements and converted them. (This difficulty with the measurements is the one thing that keeps me from buying her books). The library staff has dibs on the leftover cookies but I've decided to do a double batch because I doubt there'll be any. This, and a couple of pizzas, is the least I can do for my group of book lovers, who take turns bringing luscious desserts to the monthly meetings. The December meeting is special, of course, because Christmas is in the air.

For me, the kickoff for Christmas is Nana's House craft sale in Kingsville. This is the only hands-on Christmas shopping I do. This is where I stock up on delightful Christmas ornaments for the library staff and old-fashioned Christmas toys for the grandchildren. The rest of the shopping involves ordering books on-line and writing cheques. Couldn't be easier. We only buy for the grandchildren, nieces and nephews in our family after my husband so eloquently said one year, "Anything I haven't bought for myself, you can't afford," and everyone agreed that they didn't need someone else buying their sweaters for them.

The grandchildren are brilliant but too young to read this blog so I can safely divulge my choices for them this Christmas, namely:

Audrey and Don Wood's Merry Christmas, Big Hungry Bear! (their book, The Little Mouse, The Red Ripe Strawberry, And the Big Hungry Bear is one of their favourites);

Jane Yolen's How Do Dinosaurs Say I Love You?, the latest in her captivating, How Do Dinosaurs ... series;

Laura Numeroff's If You Give a Cat a Cupcake, a sequel to her If You Give a Moose a Muffin, If You Give a Pig a Pancake, and, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, books;

and, for the toddlers, Jeremy Tankard's Grumpy Bird, and, Puffin's Dinosaur Roar!

And who knows? Maybe I'll throw in a book for the guy who has everything.

The Method to the Madness

2009-11-29T13:39:00.009-05:00

Yes, how do authors write mystery novels? There is so much to sort out, characters and plots to contrive, details to keep straight, titles to create.

James N. Frey wrote an excellent step-by-step guide called How To Write a Damn Good Mystery which advises writers to devise a master plan, right down to having the characters write journals about themselves. What type of mystery are you writing: a police procedural, amateur sleuth, historical, romantic suspense? You'd better know. Will the murderer be clever and resourceful or wounded and afraid? What qualities will the detective/hero have?

Although he does not write mystery fiction, author Terry Fallis describes in his blog how he takes two or three months to do the planning until he ends up with an outline for each chapter which he follows on a split screen as he writes the book.

Writing an adult novel of 80,000 words or more is a considerable undertaking so creating a blueprint is clearly beneficial. The trick for the author is to do this without dissipating the energy required to actually write the book. There was a story circulating when I was in university about a guy who studied day and night for a law exam until he had it down cold. When the big day came he was thrilled to see that all the questions he'd studied for were on the exam. He checked off each question with a bold flourish, exclaiming, "I KNOW THAT ONE! I KNOW THAT ONE! I KNOW THAT ONE!", handed in his exam book and left. Authors get that.

Agatha Christie was a prolific writer, producing a book every year from the 1920s until she died in 1976. Every one was a bestseller. When her daughter, Rosalind, died in 2004, archivist John Curran retrieved and deciphered the 73 handwritten notebooks of doodlings and musings she'd used to hash out character profiles and plot contrivances. Christie would hatch out a beginning then move on to the characters that might be used, work them into a general plan, then offer up alternatives in case they were needed. Titles were suggested then discarded and sometimes the outlines sat awhile before being fleshed into novels.

I don't know whether Agatha Christie would be embarrassed or pleased to have her secret notebooks revealed but they provide an invaluable resource for anyone interested in probing the keys to her success. Pair this with the fascinating Agatha Christie: An Autobiography for hours of enjoyable reading.

News from the Pod

2009-11-17T09:30:00.018-05:00

In the past week my life has evolved from a clunky PC with 512 KB of memory to an ultra-fast MacBook with 4GB. Paired with the slothfulness of an ancient dial-up system, the PC could take half an hour to download a subject I was researching and the cache was so small that I had to restart the computer to print anything. In anticipation of the MacBook's arrival, I installed a high-speed, wireless internet service myself. Pause for congratulations.

A more efficient way of doing things isn't all I discovered. I discovered podcasts. If you're under thirty I can visualize your eyeballs rolling back in your head. Podcasts aren't exactly new. I remember Terry Fallis mentioning that he offered free podcasts of his book The Best Laid Plans before publishing it but I didn't know what that meant. Now I know.

Apple has several models of iPods but I decided on an iPod Nano because it comes with a built-in memo recorder (I almost said tape recorder, but of course there are no tapes and I didn't want to date myself. Ha!). Initially I wanted an iPod to download e-audiobooks from the library but after several frustrating sessions with the library's Overdrive system, culminating in a desire to whip the iPod into the computer screen, I decided to forget the library altogether and see what was free on iTunes. And that's how I found podcasts.

All of the major universities and news services around the world offer their lectures, newscasts, and interviews on podcasts. So far I have downloaded the Massey lectures, author interviews about their latest releases, daily front page updates from the New York Times, the BBC, and the CBC, and listened to amazing lectures from the University of Edinburgh. It's like being in university again without the staggering tuition cost.

I finally get it, the reason kids are growing earphones with umbilical wires. The world is accessible to them and they know it, whereas us bibliophiles are taking longer to get the picture. Apart from being an amazing resource for a writer, I think the iPod Nano would be a fabulous gift for an elderly person with limited mobility. Every day there would be a new podcast in whatever area of interest they choose. They could watch Martha Stewart debone a turkey or Jamie Oliver put together a delicious pasta or listen to an intelligent discussion of China's nervousness over holding such a large proportion of U.S. debt. These are not brains to be wasted.

In our household, my husband has inherited the PC and uses it to order books from the library and check out the Chapters web-site. We pass each other in the hallway and he says, "Hi Mac!" and I reply, "Hi PC!", the difference being, of course, that we're perfectly compatible.

The Brutal Telling

2009-11-10T09:37:00.020-05:00

Canadian publishers are capable of huge errors in judgement. Letting Louise Penny slip through their fingers is a case in point. If I had a wet noodle, I 'd give them twenty lashes, except that they're probably raw from self-flagellating. So many wooden ideas drag the industry down, like the idea that kids won't read a book that's more than 30,000 words (enter J.K. Rowling) and that nobody wants to read a mystery set in Canada. Where do they get these ideas? We read mysteries set in Scotland, the U.K., even Botswana, for heaven's sake. Why not Canada? And here's Louise Penny, toiling away in the Eastern Townships, knocking out a novel a year while juggling a generous schedule of public appearances, sketching out the plot of the book she's going to write next, and introducing the world to Canadian art, history, and geography in the balance. In addition to being celebrated as a superb mystery writer, she should be receiving accolades as Canada's best cultural spokesperson. Her books are declarations, not only of what a great country this is, but of what a perfect setting it is for a mystery.

The Brutal Telling. Canadiana woven right into the title. It evolves luxuriously, a story of a man found murdered in Three Pines, a village in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. Readers of Penny's other novels: Still Life, Dead Cold, The Cruellest Month, and The Murder Stone, renew their acquaintance with the villagers that run the bistro, the bakery, the B & B, the bookstore, the poets and artists snuggled into their corner until an interloper shakes up the status quo. Then how quickly the gentleness can turn to suspicion, anger, fear, greed. Automatically the reader tries to unravel the clues slowly evolving in Penny's clever plot lines. From a technical point of view, she is brilliant at transitions, moving the reader from scene to scene, changing the voice so that you're in one person's thoughts, then another's. It happens so naturally that it's invisible to the reader, but it marks a writer at her finest.

What were the Canadian publishers thinking when they let Penny slip through the net? Oh yes, I remember. Nobody wants to read a mystery set in Canada. Tell that to the New York Times.

After The Falls: Coming of Age in the Sixties

2009-11-05T09:58:00.010-05:00

I feel sorry for people who didn't live through the 60s. They don't know what they missed, and although they might not care, the society they live in was forged by the catharsis that occurred during that decade. Whether you lived it or not, Catherine Gildiner's book, After the Falls: Coming of Age in the Sixties, is a valuable social history.

For me, growing up in the border town of Windsor, Ontario meant weekend forays into downtown Detroit to check out the stores and Stouffers' hot fudge sundaes. Incredible as it sounds now, my friends and I would pile into a bus that took us through the tunnel underneath the Detroit River to the base of Woodward Avenue. From there we walked up to the large department store, J. L. Hudson. Even if the Black Panthers were outside handing out pamphlets, we never felt scared or threatened. And because we had no exposure to racism or segregation, neither did we understand their cause. A few years later we stood on the Windsor waterfront and watched in disbelief as Detroit burned. Afterwards, residents scrambled to the suburbs and took J. L. Hudson's with them.

Change in the 60s was not moderate. Riots and sit-ins in protest of the Vietnam war rocked college campuses in a way that two wars in Iraq have been unable to do. It was a different time and Gildiner's recollection of it is solid. Both of her books are intelligent examinations of her remarkable life at a time when America was beginning to redefine itself. One thing you cannot deny after reading them is: she sure had spunk.

The Lost Symbol

2009-10-17T22:09:00.029-04:00

I was stunned by the first blog I read of The Lost Symbol once I'd finished the book. The writer ripped the shingles off Dan Brown for writing claptrap about the secret societies, a subject he was sure Brown knew nothing about, and was so vitriolic in his outrage that I wondered which part of the novel had offended him. This, however, was never going to be revealed because at the end of his rant he wrote that he had not and would not ever, ever, ever, read the book! Right away I was reminded of the kerfuffle in Peterborough County in the 1980s when a woman demanded that Margaret Laurence's The Diviners be banned from the school system, only to eventually admit that she'd never read it. Recently I heard a librarian hypothesize that at some point in the future books will be downloaded directly into our brains, but who knows, maybe this is already happening?! How else could you dis a book you'd never read? (Well, actually, legitimate but harried book reviewers do this all the time but they don't start bonfires.)

I thought it was courteous of Brown to lay out in his foreward just what is factual in The Lost Symbol so that the reader doesn't have to grapple with fact over fiction. How long has it been since the release of The DaVinci Code? Five years? I've got to say, Brown, who is purportedly worth $250 million and entitled to buy his own country and sip margaritas for the rest of his life, has instead not only produced a novel of page-turning suspense but done massive amounts of research into realms the average person isn't even aware of. And although the Masons figure prominently in the plot, it is the revelation of the secret they are guarding in the book that was, for me, simply spectacular. In the end, it was not the Society or the exploration into the magically-conceived city of Washington, D.C., but the secret itself that proved to be the gem and glory of this feast. Without giving it away, something genuine shone from this premise, something that so had the ring of truth to it that I've been compelled to investigate it further. And I think that this is just about the best gift an author can give a reader.

New Releases

2009-10-16T01:41:00.006-04:00

It's terrible when you latch onto a writer who writes the best books, the ones you don't want to end, and in no time you've read everything they've ever written and it's just a matter of waiting for their next book to come out. And it seems to be taking them FOREVER ... what's the hold up anyway? Can't they write any faster? And some do the unthinkable and die! The nerve. Of course, some, like V. C. Andrews, die and keep on writing and I think that's where James Patterson is heading.

The books I want to read don't seem to dribble onto the marketplace, they're released all at once. Here are recent launches on my must-read list:

U is for Undertow by Sue Grafton, who is getting to the end of the alphabet with her Kinsey Milhone mysteries. "T" is for Trespass was a masterpiece.

The Brutal Telling by Louise Penny, the author of the Armand Gamache mysteries set in the Eastern Townships and perhaps the best of them, judging by the reviews.

Sacred hearts by Sarah Dunant, author of The Birth of Venus and In the Company of the Courtesan.

Traveling with pomegranates : a mother-daughter story by Sue Monk Kidd. This is non-fiction, written with her daughter, but Kidd is best known for The Secret Life of Bees and The Mermaid Chair.

Incontinent on the Continent : my mother, her walker and our grand tour of Italy by Jane Christmas who gave us The Pelee Project.

Half Broke Horses : a true-life novel by Jeannette Walls who wrote The Glass Castle, the unbelievable story of her childhood.

After the falls : coming of age in the 60s by Catherine Gildiner, a memoir catching up where Too Close to the Falls finished off.

Lives in the Balance: Nurses' Stories From The ICU edited by Tilda Shalof, the Toronto nurse who wrote A Nurse's Story, The Making of a Nurse, and Camp Nurse. Lives in the Balance is a collection of stories from twenty-five ICU nurses and having read all of Tilda Shalof's books I know it will be rivetting material. Her first book left me with the resolve that if I ever contemplate getting a tattoo, it will be DO NOT RESUSCITATE slapped across my chest.

The Lost Child

2009-10-03T10:28:00.025-04:00

Upon leaving Edinburgh in 2007, every nook and cranny of my suitcase was jammed with Julie Myerson's books. I wasn't familiar with this author but the sticker on The Story of You claimed it was a Daily Mail Book Club Choice and it became my mealtime companion. It slid down like an oyster. I went back to Waterstone's and bought Something Might Happen and when I polished that off, I bought Home for the plane ride back to Canada. Naturally I was going to read The Lost Child as soon as it was released.

The Daily Telegraph calls The Lost Child "devastating in its candor ... A serious, writerly self-critical account of what it means to feel that, despite love and hope and good intentions, you have failed as a parent, and that the child you bore (while still eerily painfully familiar) is lost to you."

It is every parent's nightmare: the gorgeous, precocious child withdrawing in surliness from society - hostile, violent, argumentative, disinterested in school, family, and life. Although Myerson and her partner knew Jake was smoking pot, they dismissed it as harmless and did not associate the change in him with the habit. A friend from New York, who recognized the connection, gave them a one-hour telephone consultation with a Manhattan psychiatrist who put it into perspective, telling them that today's cannabis has been genetically modified to be fifteen to thirty times stronger than what was smoked in the 60s in the ingredient called THC that can induce psychosis. The age at which the child starts smoking is critical because the brain is still developing until the age of 18 (some scientists say twenty-one) and THC can distort the neural pathways emerging in the frontal lobes. The situation has catapulted cannabis ahead of heroin in the damage it can do to the human body and the research into how to repair these damaged brains is just beginning.

Jake Myerson countered with the claim that his mother unfairly labelled him a drug addict and aired the family's dirty laundry for personal gain. (Daily Mail Interview) Quite a lot of people jumped to his side so I was interested in reading The Lost Child to see if it did smack of opportunism. To the contrary, the overriding impression the book left me with was that of anguish.

A counsellor the Myersons started seeing put them in touch with a couple who had lost two sons to the addiction. Their story was much worse and involved a lot more years. "Out there all over the country, plenty of families are dealing with this, says the woman, flicking a look at the London skies. Far more than anyone realises. Seriously. It's a whole new way to lose your kids."

Ironically, in The Lost Child Julie Myerson winds her family's story around that of watercolorist Mary Yelloly who died, aged twenty-one, of consumption in the mid-1800s. Mary Yelloly's mother lost seven of her ten children to TB. That was the old way of losing a child.

Old way or new way, it's anguish, pure and simple.

The Lost Art of Gratitude

2009-09-27T13:31:00.026-04:00

A couple of years ago at this time, I was in Edinburgh, battling a cold as I am now. I had a Britrail pass offering me unlimited travel in Scotland but I never got out of the city. Fortunately I'd had three good days in which to tour the Royal Mile, the Royal Yacht Britannia, and both castles before I got sick, so I'd already done the touristy things. I prefer to rent an apartment when I travel but I was grateful to be in a good B & B so that someone would find me if I passed out from weakness. Being a little Scottish myself, I don't waste a travel dollar lightly, even if I am feverish, so I worked out a routine whereby I ate breakfast in the dining room each morning, went back to bed until noon, then took a cab to a particular destination. The nice thing about Edinburgh is that you can walk or bus everywhere very easily, but I had to conserve my energy so I'd pick one thing to see, perhaps the university or The Writers' Museum, have dinner in one of the fabulous New Town restaurants, and be back in bed at the B & B by six. And even though I saw the city at a snail's pace, I loved Edinburgh.

Enter the Isabel Dalhousie series, set in Edinburgh, and I'm in my glory. I don't know what classification these books fall into. Not the traditional mystery genre, to be sure. There's always a bit of intrigue centred around Isabel's dignified life that has to be reconciled along the way, but what really seems to be front and centre is a genteel way of doing things. If the unexamined life is not worth living, Isabel Dalhousie never has to worry, as she examines every action of her life with the same moral compass she applies to the philosophy journal she edits. This is a woman who thinks a lot and if you're not inclined to watch the machinations of her mind, you'll want to choose something else. Readers of McCall Smith's popular Botswana series, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective agency, lament that "nothing happens" in the Isabel Dalhousie series, with perfect legitimacy. Of course, things are happening but they are not poignant or dramatic, they are just very Edinburgh-ish. Like the city, things evolve slowly, meticulously, carefully. You know when you pick up one of these books that Isabel is not going to get falling-down drunk or tell someone off at the grocery store. And if McCall Smith did run amok and pen this in some day, you know Isabel would be wearing plaid. To conclude, these are gentle, comforting novels; at least that's their appeal to me. And right now, with my stuffed-up sinuses, I appreciate a little comfort.

The Library Teapot

2009-09-20T17:53:00.014-04:00

I was enjoying the rapidly dwindling hours on the sunporch, moving into Chapter 6 of The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie, remarking to myself on the likable child heroine, not unlike that found in Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, when

I came across the words, "We were having tea. Miss Mountjoy had excavated a battered tea kettle ...", and I shot off the sofa, reminded that I had to replace the library's teapot. I drove to The Barn Sale just outside of town, the urgency being that it's only open on weekends and it was four o'clock.

The establishment is composed of three dusty barns crammed with items of assorted vintage. I won't say junk because although some of it is, I've managed to snag a Limoges platter, cut glass drinking glasses, and a glass cake stand, very reasonably, and am always on the lookout for anything I've seen on the Antiques Roadshow. If you lose your balance in this place, you're done for because everything is stacked precariously and the aisles are barely wide enough for your hips. I was looking specifically for the large Pyrex teapot I'd seen there before and managed to find it in the first barn. Dainty china teapots just can't handle our crowd anymore.

At last week's meeting of the library bookclub I handed out the reading list for 2010, so the secret is out, and the selections include, in order of month: Love and Other Impossible Pursuits (Ayelet Waldman); Paths of Glory (Jeffrey Archer); The Cellist of Sarajevo (Steven Galloway); After the Falls; coming of age in the 60s (Catherine Gildiner); Water for Elephants (Sara Gruen); The Places in Between (Rory Stewart); The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie (Alan Bradley); The Little Giant of Aberdeen County (Tiffany Baker); Never Shoot a Stampede Queen (Mark Leiren-Young); The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (Mary Ann Shaffer); The Secret Papers of Madame Olivetti (Annie Vanderbilt); and, Still Alice (Lisa Genova).

There were so many great books to choose from that I kicked six of them onto the 2011 list. Hopefully the teapot will still be able to accommodate us then.

Daring Missions of World War II

2009-09-16T18:04:00.015-04:00

Publishers Weekly calls Daring Missions of World War II by William B. Breuer, "a book for rainy days and long solitary nights by the fire", but I've been reading it in the cool autumn air on the patio with a cup of tea on one side and my laptop on the other. Originally I ordered it for research purposes, thinking that I'd skirt around the boring parts, but there are no boring parts. I've been reading every word, thoroughly absorbed as Breuer reveals the stuff the history books left out. He's just the man to do it, having 31 other books under his belt with titles such as: Storming Hitler's Rhine, Nazi Spies in America, and Unexplained Mysteries of World War II. This is the type of book I would normally leave to my husband so I was surprised to find myself so wrapped up in it. When I think about it though, the war experience has been present in The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society and Diana Athill's memoirs, but not in quite the same way. Those aren't the stories from the front. Those are the stories of the people left behind, and no less compelling because they are. It's just that in Daring Missions of World War II, you're privy to how the underground movements got downed Allied servicemen out of enemy territory, how spies got their information, and what unusual things were happening on both sides of the conflict. Example: a British soldier with two artificial legs is driving a jeep that gets hit. One of his legs is pinned and he has to release it before the jeep explodes. He's taken prisoner with only one leg and has the cheek to ask the Germans to wire British command to fly over another leg and parachute it down to him at the P.O.W. camp. Sure, why not? Only that's exactly what happens! Of course, the reason the soldier wants the other leg is so that he can escape. Another story tells of how the resistance set up a laundry that took in the Germans' washing. When the Germans got their orders to relocate, they'd run to the laundry to pick up their clothes, only to be told that they weren't ready yet but if they left a forwarding address, they'd make sure they got them. The Germans did and the resistance passed on the location to the Allies. These bizarre incidents are like something out of Catch-22. I'll be sad when all the excitement dies down.

Diverted

2009-09-12T09:04:00.006-04:00

Those of us who live in small towns know it is entirely possible to dial a wrong number and spend half an hour catching up with whomever answered the phone. I like small towns like mine because the bank, grocery store, post office, library, hardware store, and pharmacy are within walking distance of each other and while everyone might not know your name, they don't mind pausing for a chat. And as I discovered yesterday, it is the kind of place you can leave the sliding door of your minivan open, unintentionally, and come back from grocery shopping to find everything still there.

It was this small-town charm that overwhelmed the passengers of 39 jets diverted to Gander, Newfoundland on Sept. 11th, 2001. On that day, Gander, with a population of only 9,000 people, dropped everything and took in 6,600 tired, hungry, and worried travellers, who came to realize how lucky they were to have landed there. Over the years, tributes have poured in from these grateful people praising the warmth and generosity of the Newfoundlanders and the astounding beauty of the province. Many struck up friendships with the residents and some even bought property there. Last night, on the anniversary of 9/11, CBC aired the made-for-TV movie, Diverted, which dramatized the events of those days in Gander. The logistics of hosting 6,600 people on a moment's notice are staggering but as one of the residents said, "People are like teabags. You don't really find out how strong they are until they're put in hot water." Amen to that.

Love and Other Impossible Pursuits

2009-09-03T21:11:00.021-04:00

New York has been bumping into me a lot this week. I was picking up a prescription at the pharmacy and the 2nd season of Sex and the City was on sale. I missed it when it was originally on TV and devoured these three DVDs in two nights.

Then at the bookstore I bought the Mamas and Papas Gold CD pack which I uploaded into my car's Jukebox so that I could hear "Twelve-thirty" at the push of a button (I used to live in New York City/Everything there was dark and dirty ...) "Do you have to have that so loud?" my husband asks.

And then I fell into Ayelet Waldman's book Love and Other Impossible Pursuits and it brought back many memories of NYC ... and the regret that I hadn't combed Central Park more thoroughly when I'd had the chance. It was the 80s though and the city's reputation hadn't been cleaned up yet.

My only contact in New York was a man named Imre who cut fabric for the designer Koos van den Akker. We met at the Shouldice Hospital in Toronto after having our hernias repaired, only he'd had both sides done and would plead fruitlessly with me to stop making him laugh because it made the stainless steel sutures pinch.

He got back at me when he dropped my husband and I off at a Broadway show and suggested we walk back to the hotel afterwards, registering my terrified expression as I envisioned dodging muggers on dark, empty streets the entire way. Even though he wasn't there to see the look on my face as we walked out of the theatre at midnight into thousands of people mobbing the sidewalk, six across, laughing and talking and having a great time, I knew he'd gotten a chuckle out of it. Our hotel faced Central Park and the streets rocked all night. Waldman's book captures that endless, pulsing energy, and it contains a remarkable story.

Waldman and her husband, author Michael Chabon, are a pretty interesting pair themselves, still red-hot for each other after four children, and living in Berkeley, California. She is not shy about talking about the passion she has for Michael and the life they've made together. A few years ago she wrote a very forthright blog called "bad mothers"around another book she was writing. Only, Emilia Greenleaf, the central character in Love and Other Impossible Pursuits, sees herself not only as a bad mother but also as the bad stepmother of William, a five-year-old going on forty. She has broken up his happy home and is now making a mess of her life with his father. Her newborn baby has died and she can't get over it. "Don't they realize that obsessive self-pity is an all-consuming activity that leaves no room for conversation?" she asks.

I rooted for Emilia the whole way through, wanting to e-mail her friendly tips and cheery notes. I didn't want to put the book down to go to bed, could hardly wait to get home from work to pick up the story again. When I got to the last chapters I started to cry. It was like that point in the movie Steel Magnolias where Sally Field's character is pounding down the hallway of the hospital to her daughter's room and I can't hold it in any longer. Waldman skillfully spills the brutish honesty of these lives without artificiality. It would have been tempting to reach for the bottle of contrivance or forced endings but she resists that and the book resonates as a result.

Two thumbs and four wet hankies, way up. This is definitely a pick for the 2010 bookclub reading list.

Fatally Flaky

2009-08-31T13:15:00.014-04:00

I canned the tomato chutney last week. Today I tackled the peaches. As I'm writing this, the jars, which have just come out of the water bath, are popping which means they're sealing properly. The kitchen floor is sticky with peach juice and my flip flops sound like suction cups on it. I remember exactly where I was on 9/11. I was in the Essex Thrift Store buying canning jars for 25 cents apiece. Someone had turned on a used TV behind the checkout counter and the salesclerks were standing around it watching the planes fly into the twin towers. I thought it was a movie. When they told me what was happening, I asked, "Why?" Nobody knew. One of the announcers said they thought Afghanistan was responsible. "What does Afghanistan have against the United States?" I asked. Nobody knew. Now, every canning season I think back on that, perhaps because I'm using those jars.

As well as canning, I've been reading books centred around food, specifically Diane Mott Davidson's Fatally Flaky and Judith Jones' The Tenth Muse, My Life in Food. If you've seen the movie Julie & Julia, you know that Judith Jones was the editor at Knopf that accepted Mastering the Art of French Cooking when it looked like those years of writing and rewriting and testing recipes was going to be for naught. Right off the bat Jones describes how leftovers were used in the house she grew up in: "One never let things go to waste, so Edie learned to turn leftovers into wonderful dishes: crispy croquettes with creamy lamb, ham or chicken inside; shepherd's pie of ground-up leftover lamb with a mashed-potato topping; minced meats in cream on toast; stuffed vegetables." And right there she had me, because no one else I've ever met is familiar with "minced meats in cream on toast". In our house my mother used canned tunafish and called the luncheon dish, "Creamed tunafish on toast." Just the description made my sister-in-law gag but it's one of those things we grew up on and figured everyone ate. It's very easy to make: a can of peas and a can of tuna in a white sauce, piping hot, spooned over toast and seasoned with salt and pepper. It's very filling and you can substitute canned salmon for the tunafish.

Davidson's Fatally Flaky is a light culinary mystery you'll figure out halfway through but which will keep you reading just to discover what lovely tidbits the caterer is feeding her hunky husband. Davidson includes recipes, including the ones for "Nutcase Cranberry-Apricot Bread" and "Fatally Flaky Cookies" at the back of the book and I was very impressed that her detective had the energy to deal with flaky clients, cater a wedding, solve a couple of murders, and whip up these dishes for her husband at the end of the day. Whew! Definitely not a book I'm going to let my husband read, that's for sure!

The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher

2009-08-24T13:14:00.014-04:00

There's something gratifying about a Victorian murder mystery. It comes with all the elements of classic detective fiction: mystery, suspense, and the unravelling of clues, but in the midst of chilly manor houses, carriages negotiating foggy streets, and detectives working with nothing more than keen observation and sharp deductive powers. For me, the vagaries of their work adds to its appeal. The absence of the forensic sciences means that there will be no DNA analysis of bloodstains or tracing of breast implant serial numbers. Neither will Interpol or fingerprint databases obscure twisted family histories revealed slowly through half-truths and the gossip of eavesdropping servants.

The Road Hill murder of three-year-old Saville Kent in a country house near a small village in June 1860 was the sensation of the British press at the time and turned the public into amateur sleuths. It also spawned the first detective fiction and influenced the writing of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. Summerscale has shaped The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher to read like a classic detective novel, focusing on one of Scotland Yard's first investigators, Jack Whicher, whose career was left in shambles by the case. Sifting through volumes of records and coming up with such a compelling page-turner is a tribute to her skill. And because the book deals with the first of the manor-house mysteries, it would be a useful and brilliant resource for anyone considering writing one.

Free-Stone Peaches & Red Tomato and Garlic Chutney

2009-08-19T20:46:00.017-04:00

The season is changing in not-so-subtle ways. Early morning darkness. Early evening darkness. That part is very sad but autumn is still my favourite time of year and my kitchen is about to become a steam factory as I can peaches and plums and pickles and tomatoes. This year I'm going to make little pots of chutney that I'll use as hostess gifts throughout the year and I'm scouring magazines and cookbooks for the best recipes. And as I took a dash through my newly-acquired edition of Jamie's Food Revolution, I read the Introduction and discovered that it's really a launch for a new plan of Jamie's to get people to cook at home. Recently a journalist on TV was commenting on the fact that there is now a generation that has never been without the internet or cellphones. As Jamie points out, this same generation has also been able to grow up without ever having eaten a home-cooked meal. A can of beans served with frozen fish sticks doesn't count.
What people consume at mealtime, or in between, is largely fast food, delivery, or takeout. Home economics classes are a thing of the past so people just aren't learning to cook. What Jamie has done is compile a book of basic but delicious recipes and has issued a "Pass It On" challenge for readers. Learn one recipe out of each chapter and pass it on to two other people. Actually get them over to do the hands-on work and eat the finished product, and pass the challenge on to them so that they show two people they know. The idea harkens back to the Second World War when the woman he's dedicated the book to, Marguerite Patten, worked with the British Ministry of Food to teach people how to cook using their limited rations so that the country wouldn't starve. Oliver is working not to fix starvation but to counter the grim realities of this era, obesity and diabetes, which have been aided and abetted by the processed food industry.

Personally I give high marks for the recipes I've completed: the Ground Beef Wellington, an elegant slant on a pound of ground beef; the fantastic Pot-roast Meatloaf smacked with cumin and coriander for an outstanding taste; Crunchy Garlic Chicken, so fast and tasty; and the Perfect Roast Chicken with vegetables that roast underneath it. Fall will mean cooking up some Leek and Potato soup in the crockpot and something new that sounds fabulous: Sweet Potato and Chorizo Soup. Chorizo being a sausage, apparently. Still a lot to learn. I definitely want to try out the curry recipes he's included. Meanwhile, I've got mason jars to sterilize and tomatoes to peel for my fall ritual. Canning is SO messy ... but so fulfilling. When I open a jar of fragrant, juicy peaches in the dead of winter, I'll be transported back to this wonderful time of year.

Chugging to the Top

2009-08-16T11:18:00.024-04:00

Sunday, 10 a.m: I'm settling into Andrew Pyper's The Killing Circle . On the strength of Lost Girls and The Trade Mission, I trust Pyper, which is why I'm still with the book even though we're nearing the top of the roller coaster and I know he's about to send me hurtling into depths I don't really want to explore. Yet, oddly, even though things are getting very Stephen King-ish and I terrify easily, I'm compelled to read further to see what Pyper's going to do with this material he's set up. So I prepare to dig my nails into the guard rail as the car starts to plummet.

12 noon: The narrator breaks away from the dark, scary things and lets in a spot of sunshine as he pushes the time up and redirects the plot. Reluctantly I make lunch, throw some hot dogs on so that I can get back to the book. I take deep breaths and relax. Too soon. The serial killings in Toronto might have stopped but now the unpublished writers who met four years ago and read their work to each other have the feeling they're being followed.

By 3 pm. I'm analyzing all the characters for clues, trying to piece together the relationship between the stories they told in the writing circle and the deadly turn things are taking.

6 pm. Drat. I've got to get dinner on. Right when I think I've figured it out. Eat fast to get back to it. At first I thought the book was a ghost story but it transmogrified into an out-and-out literary mystery. All of the characters have issues, motives, reasons for writing. Reasons for killing. Past life and real life twist like rotini around each other. I'm reading as fast as I can now to see how the narrator, whose son has been abducted, is going to find him.

9 pm. I'm turned on my head in the last chapter. Surprises everywhere. Could not see that coming. People not who I thought they were. Pyper pulled it off brilliantly. Great mystery writing. Must go back to the beginning and reread.

Julie & Julia

2009-08-10T07:27:00.027-04:00

I have to admit that I was first off the mark to see the movie Julie & Julia, more than a bit puzzled by its lukewarm reviews and a bit foggy as to why I couldn't get through the book when it was first published in 2005. I had no reservations about Julia Child's memoir My Life in France though and have enjoyed the previews of Meryl Streep in her role. So my mother and I got tickets for Julie & Julia and sent my husband off to see G. I. Joe, and, contrary to the reviews, we thought it was delightful. Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci might seem like an odd pairing but they soar in this depiction of Julia and Paul's exuberance for life and their love for each other. And Amy Adams depicts Julie Powell as sweet and earnest and a good cook, even if she is rattled by the task of cooking all the recipes from Julia's Mastering the Art of French Cooking in 365 days. Of course, that's the problem, and that's why the critics are grinding their teeth. It wasn't until I went back to Julie Powell's original 2002 blog, The Julie/Julia Project , and started reading through the entries, that I remembered why I couldn't get through the book. It was also somewhat of a vindication for those reviewers who have pointed out that Julia Child thought Julie Powell was vulgar and not a serious cook and had no desire to meet her. The only positive thing I can say about winding your way through f**king, godd**ned, and sh*t, over and over and over again, is that it distracts from the poor writing. What I found profoundly annoying is her irritation with Julia Child and her recipes. There has been a general call to arms over the fact that Julie Powell is making a great deal of money on the back of Julia Child when she has so little talent. (Not to be missed is Karen von Hahn's mock impersonation of her in Saturday's Globe and Mail.)

Julie Powell's blog went unnoticed apart from her blog fans until Amanda Hesser's inter view with her in The New York Times in 2003. Amanda Hesser is the fiercely ambitious food writer who replaced Ruth Reichl when she moved to Gourmet, and a perfectionist who is an expert in French cuisine. She not only cooks but writes passionately and well about food and her own book Cooking for Mr. Latte is as readable as it is fun. No small amount of irony then that she was responsible for launching Julie Powell's career. When I saw her interviewing Julie Powell in the movie my immediate reaction was that Powell was done for, but that was not the case. In real life Hesser censored Powell's colourful language by substituting the word "cookie" and gave her some stars for tackling Child's book. This part is not in the movie. The movie has no expletives to grate on delicate ears and my mother and I came away feeling satisfied and .... well, hungry. I give it two thumbs up, but if you want to capture the full flavour, I'd start with Julia Child's My Life in France over a glass of chilled white wine.

Author Diaries

2009-08-07T15:21:00.034-04:00

I've had to temporarily postpone reading The Killing Circle by Andrew Pyper in order to read Diana Athill's Instead of a Letter about her days at Oxford and sad history with her fiance, Paul. It came in on an Interlibrary Loan and automatically became the priority.

I have a particular affinity for authors' stories about themselves. Some I like better than the books they've written. Apart from Cujo and Nightshift, I've never been a huge fan of Stephen King's (only because I'm prone to nightmares) but I've read his part autobiography/part dissertation On Writing several times and will never tire of it. Similarly, I treasure Joyce Carol Oates' The Falls but find her journals the most inspiring, and have read and reread Rubio and Waterston's editions of the The Selected Journals of L. M. Montgomery because I find Maud's daily life more captivating than most of her novels.

Recently I started following authors' blogs, which are essentially on-line diaries. My favourite is Louise Penny's, but not to the exclusion of her Armand Gamache mysteries set in the Eastern Townships. These are pure candy and I'm eagerly anticipating The Brutal Telling, due out next month. Not only does Penny share useful writing tips (e.g., backup your manuscript by sending it to yourself in an e-mail) but I love following her fast-paced, well-travelled life. A seasoned broadcaster with the CBC, she threw herself into writing full-time and after a prolonged session with writer's block, produced her first mystery novel, Still Life. Even with street creds she was unable to find a publisher so she entered it into the Debut Dagger competition sponsored by the Crime Writers Association in Great Britain and ended up getting a leading London literary agent and three-book deals with Hodder/Headline in the UK and St. Martin's Minotaur in the US. Her blog entries are fresh and candid. During one sleepless night I read all of the entries for 2007, at the end of which I knew so much about her life that I thought of her as a dear friend. Today I read this year's March entries and misted up over the death of her golden retriever, Maggie.

The lovely part of blogs is that the authors usually list their favourite blogs on which you can find another set of fascinating blogs, and so on. I find it hard not to be intrigued by the "behind-the-scenes" information and the pictures the authors share. It's raw writer-to-reader stuff without all the glitz. What would Lucy Maud Montgomery write on her blog? Would she go deep like Louise Penny? I wonder.

Fifty years in publishing

2009-08-03T21:46:00.020-04:00

Diana Athill is 92 years old and an icon as far as book editors go. From 1939 until she retired at age 75, she worked closely with authors Philip Roth, Norman Mailer, John Updike, Mordecai Richler, Simone de Beauvoir, Brian Moore, and V.S. Naipaul at the British publishing company, Andre Deutsch. She writes of these fifty years in her memoir Stet, proofreading jargon for "let it stand".

The book is a rich history of the book industry from World War II to the present, through a lean start-up and a fluid landscape. Andre Deutsch was a small, low budget firm on the lookout for new authors, many of whom were sent their way by authors they already handled. In time these authors would be lured away by bigger houses offering huge advances. Still, Athill's critical eye and her propensity for nurturing finicky and sometimes unstable authors was instrumental in the development of the company. Her salary was punitive but her judgement was respected. She describes the vagaries of the industry as such:

"... every publisher knows that you don't necessarily become a best-seller by writing well. Of course you don't necessarily have to write badly to do it: it is true that some best-selling books are written astonishingly badly, and equally true that some are written very well. The quality of the writing - even the quality of the thinking - is irrelevant. It is a matter of whether or not a nerve is hit in the wider reading public as opposed to the serious one which is composed of people who are interested in writing as an art."

With equal clarity she delves into the personalities and foibles of the writers she represented, characterizing author Brian Moore's annoyance of his wife's distress when he left her for another woman as one of wanting to "have your omelette without breaking your eggs".

Stet, published in 2000, is part of an autobiographical series that includes: Instead of a Letter (1963), After a Funeral (1987), Make Believe (1993), Yesterday Morning: A Very English Childhood (2002), and, Somewhere Towards the End (2008). Athill, now more famous than ever, is making a strong finish to an interesting life.

The Secret Papers of Madame Olivetti

2009-07-31T07:35:00.016-04:00

I would like to say to Annie Vanderbilt, the author of The Secret Papers of Madame Olivetti, that her book is a feast. One of her favourite novels is Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, so she will know what I mean. She has Ondaatje's gift of being able to weave a tapestry of time and place in such a way that you're so entranced by the quality of the threads that it's a bonus when a beautiful piece of work results.

Madame Olivetti is the typewriter that Lily Crisp has taken with her to Southern France to spill out her life onto paper after the death of her husband. It assembles her married life against the backdrop of her husband's family history, her own passionate nature, and the marvelous landscapes afforded by France, Idaho, and Mexico. Lily wants to make sense of it all before she sets sail into widowhood. Her story seesaws back and forth in absolutely luscious language.

I almost passed up this novel when it came into the library because it sports one of those covers that suggests frivolity but a glance inside suggested that the writing was fine and careful. The Secret Papers of Madame Olivetti actually took Annie Vanderbilt, who is 63, more than ten years to write, the writing sandwiched between her own exotic travels and taking care of elderly relatives. This is her first published novel and another is in the works. The manuscript of her first book, entitled Yesterday's Woman, was destroyed when her house in Idaho burned to the ground. For me, the heartache at losing a manuscript would match that of losing one's house. All that work.

Vanderbilt's web-site at http://www.annievanderbilt.com/ is also a treat.

Mixing It Up

2009-07-21T22:22:00.009-04:00

This time of year I'm getting together the 2010 reading list for the library's adult bookclub. I take this job very seriously, trying to offer a mix of fiction and non-fiction, literary travel, memoir, and a splattering of Canadian, American, and British authors. A lot of the brightest fiction is coming from the Middle East. I work that in too. After the selection of the month is presented and the treats devoured, we discuss other books we've been reading. I publish this list and hand it out at the next meeting. Good ideas are traded this way. Repeat recommendations often make it to the next reading list. Six years in and we're a strong group, even over the summer months. Friendships have been made. You don't have to have a Ph.D in English Literature to belong. It's not that serious. A few times a year we pile into minivans and head down to the cinema to watch a movie made from a book, then hash it out over cups of hot chocolate at Tim Hortons. Next year I think we'll carpool to the Lakefield Literary Festival. Great fun there.

For reasons that elude me, some years are dry and the reading lists are difficult to compile. Thousands of books and all I have to do is find twelve. It takes a lot of time. I read a lot of reviews and a lot of books. This year however, choices abound! There's Never Shoot a Stampede Queen by Mark Leiren-Young for everyone who loved the television show Northern Exposure. Funny books are the hardest to find and this gem won the Leacock Medal for Humour this year. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer, Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen, Still Alice by Lisa Genova. I don't want to give away the whole list. Maybe The Killing Circle by Andrew Pyper, who cracked everyone up at the Lakefield Literary Festival last weekend. I don't have The Killing Circle yet but liked what he read. No, it's not a funny book, but he does a good job of warming up the audience. Probably Paths of Glory by Jeffrey Archer. I'd like to throw in Kate Atkinson's When Will There Be Good News? even though we just covered One Good Turn not too long ago. Such good writing though. What to choose ... what to choose.

Eloise at The Plaza

2009-07-13T22:02:00.019-04:00

In a brilliant piece of cross-marketing, the newly-refurbished Plaza hotel in New York is offering a "Live Like Eloise Package" for little girls who have been captivated by the book Eloise at The Plaza. It sounds enchanting ... the sort of special weekend that someone would plan for a favourite granddaughter or niece.

Written in the 1950s, Eloise at The Plaza is the still-very-popular story of six-year-old Eloise, who lives at The Plaza and is quite adept at ordering room service and causing mayhem. Now The Plaza is offering little girls the chance to be Eloise and according to an article by Leah Rumack in May's issue of FASHION magazine, it lives up to expectations. The would-be Eloise is designated her own white-gloved butler who will draw an "Eloise bath" complete with miniature bathrobe and slippers and a silver tray loaded with a chocolate milkshake, cookies, plastic sparkly jewellery, bubble bath, an Eloise book, and a rubber ducky. The staff are all in on the plot: notes from Eloise, "who knows all the secret passageways", appear unexpectedly, and even the bellhop will let the would-be Eloise ride up to the suite on the back of the luggage cart. Could there be more fun than this? Maybe ordering the "Charge it Please, Mac and Cheese" or "I'm-Not-a-Chicken Soup" from room service, delivered on fine china.

Hats off to The Plaza! What an amazingly clever way to make books come alive.

Words & Music

2009-07-11T10:26:00.020-04:00

Poets have some interesting contests. The Six-Word Poetry Contest, for instance. I'm not sure it still exists but it's an intriguing exercise in writing succinctly. Here is one of the past entries: For sale: baby shoes, never used. Six words that tell a whole story. No, Dad, mother's dead, I'm Lucy. I'm just throwing a couple out there. Day Five: chocolate bar, no lunch. If you want to e-mail me your compositions, I'll publish the best ones on the blog. No prize though.

CV2 sponsors the 2 Day Poem Contest, which can be found at: http://www.contemporaryverse2.ca/contest_2day.php. The twist here is that every writer must incorporate the same ten words into their poem, keep it under 48 lines, and write it in two days. The words for the 2009 contest were: PARLOUR, EFFERVESCENT, KUMQUAT, NOXIOUS, SINK, QUAGMIRE, GRADATION, IMPROVISE, FREAK, and DIAL. Yikes!

Songwriters are, of course, accustomed to writing economically in order to get their message across in three minutes. You can actually make money writing lyrics if you happen to pen something timeless like White Christmas. I have it on good authority that lyricists get a bit of help from books like the Essential Songwriter's Rhyming Dictionary. I've been trying to get something together with the words: mamma, Bahama, comma, Dalai Lama, drama, and pajama in it, but so far, nothing's come to mind.

Oh well. No drama, Bahama mamma, pink pajama.

Books To Wait By

2009-06-29T11:44:00.008-04:00

When sticky summer finally arrives, there is a certain amount of hype over those books considered "beach reads", a little book shorthand for what I refer to as "airport books" - the light, fast-paced mysteries that will see you through the long waits. You know the ones ... where you arrive at Heathrow 45 minutes ahead of schedule thanks to a tailwind and then are kept waiting in line at immigration for two hours as three officers wait on a couple of thousand people. Or, conversely, you arrive back at Toronto Pearson airport into the ultramodern international flight arrival area and are whisked through immigration, only to wait for an hour and a half for your luggage. I can only people-watch for so long before getting dizzy so I'm grateful for the airport bookshops, even if they do try to fob off reprints of Sidney Sheldon's old novels as new releases. Two books I read over the weekend are safe bets for either airplane travel or beach reading: Loitering with Intent by Stuart Woods, and Still Life by Joy Fielding. (There is an equally-deserving mystery by Louise Penny called Still Life. In case you're wondering, authors are able to use each other's titles because there is no copyright on book titles.)

Both of these books concern rich families and children with big trust funds. Loitering with Intent is one that would happily fit into the "waiting for the plane, visa stamp, or luggage" slot, because it's the quicker read of the two. In it, lawyer and ex-cop, Stone Barrington is enlisted to go to the Florida Keys to find the son of a rich businessman who needs him to sign off on the sale of the business. It briskly evolves into a case of mistaken identity and who's trying to kill whom, with a little romance thrown in.

Joy Fielding's Still Life is going to take a few more hours to read but you'll still be able to catch the inflight movie and eat your soggy meal. A woman who has the perfect job and husband and has inherited a lot of money from her father, is the victim of a hit-and-run. Lying in the hospital in a coma, with practically every bone in her body broken, she cannot move, blink, see, eat, or breathe on her own in the beginning, but she can hear everything going on around her. There is some suspicion that the hit-and-run was not an accident. Assuming that she can't hear anything, the people who come to visit her talk freely and she starts speculating, as do we, as to who would have tried to kill her. There are several potential candidates and the real horror begins when she discovers who it is and that this person has every intention of finishing the job. Like me, you might be flipping pages so fast you won't care about the inflight movie.

Dinner, Can't We Take Them Out Too?

2009-06-28T21:28:00.022-04:00

The day started with me looking up from my bowl of porridge at the diner to see a woman in an SUV stopped at Division and Main, making a sawing motion with her left arm. I squinted in order to figure out what she was doing and recognized the object in her hand as being ... a toothbrush. Yes, she was brushing her teeth at the stoplight. It reminded me of those women in the 60s who went downtown with their hair in rollers, ostensibly because they were going out somewhere later ... but weren't they already out? People do strange things in public.

It's funny how the mind plays tricks on you. After I finished browsing through the cookbook section at Indigo today I started thinking about what, for me, makes a good cookbook. Hands down, it's the conversation the writer is having about the food. Two books sprang out at me from their display shelves: Jamie's Food Revolution: Rediscover How to Cook Simple, Delicious, Affordable Meals and We've Always Had Paris...and Provence by Patricia Wells. Jamie Oliver has come a long way from being the naked chef, and despite a frightful workload has maintained his raw, contagious enthusiasm for well-prepared food. He is, as well, a cook with a conscience, asking all of us to consider the treatment of the animals who lay our eggs or provide us with chops and leads us to the garden to demonstrate how things grow. He has set underprivileged young people to work in the kitchen and revolutionized the food service at school cafeterias in Britain. To my mind, he is a hero in his field. He peppers his new book, Jamie's Food Revolution, with testimonials from people who have just learned to cook using his recipes. This is a book you could comfortably give a newly-married couple or a kid setting up his first apartment. I'll buy it not only for Jamie's wonderful chit-chat but because I believe that people like Jamie Oliver deserve my support.

Patricia Wells and her husband, Walter, have written a memoir-with-recipes of their idyllic life in France. I expect that We've Always Had Paris ... and Provence will be every bit as wonderful as Julia Child's My Life in France which has just been re-released. This is what I call "culinary literature", cooking with a story to go with it. Truthfully, it's faster for me to go to http://www.foodtv.com/ and pull up a recipe for quiche than it is to thumb through my cookbooks. I think most food writers are getting this now. Food is a sensual experience and if they want to sell their books, they've got to deliver the foreplay. Which brings me to my faulty memory. The first writer I can remember who "talked" to her readers was Peg Bracken who wrote The I Hate to Cook Book and The Appendix to the I Hate to Cook Book in the 60s. (I apologize to Jamie Oliver and Patricia Wells for putting them in the same blog when they are in entirely different leagues.) Peg Bracken cooked with a lot of back talk and cream of mushroom soup and found a shortcut for everything - and she reached out to all of us who hyperventilate into paper bags at the prospect of having company over for dinner. There was a humorous story and catchy title to most of her recipes. Her "stayabed stew" became a household standby. And yet, for some reason, when I googled that recipe a few minutes ago, I discovered that it does not contain the V-8 juice and tapioca that my mother and I put in it. Now I'm not sure where ours came from. But here is the original Peg Bracken recipe. You can just toss the ingredients in a crockpot when you go to work in the morning and come home at night to a delicious stew, and I'm sure Peg wouldn't mind if you substituted V-8 juice and added a little tapioca to thicken it.

STAYABED STEW by Peg Bracken

(This is for the days when you`re en negligee, en bed, with a murder story and a box of bonbons, or possibly a good case of flu.) 5-6 servings

Mix these things up in a casserole dish that has a tight lid:

2 pounds beef stew meat, cubed

1 can of little tiny peas

1 cup of sliced carrots

2 chopped onions

1 teaspoon salt dash of pepper

1 can cream of tomato soup thinned with 1/2 can water (or celery or mushroom soup thinned likewise)

1 big, raw potato, sliced

Piece of bay leaf

Put the lid on and put the casserole in a 275 degree oven. Now go back to bed. It will cook happily all by itself and be done in five hours.

She also had a killer recipe for a 6-minute cheesecake and something you can whip up for guests called "Fat Man's Shrimp". But mostly she had a breezy, carefree banter that could make you forget what you were cooking entirely.

The Places In Between

2009-06-26T10:48:00.029-04:00

It was a sizzling, humid 91 degrees in Windsor on Wednesday and the air conditioner in the car wasn't working so I was grumpy even before we got to the Cancer Clinic, a place we're going to see a lot of over the summer as my husband begins radiation treatments for prostate cancer. Thankfully, it was blissfully cool as we waited. Everything about the clinic is set up to minimize the horror of the disease. Reception and waiting areas resemble those of a corporate headquarters, not a hospital. The staff doesn't walk around in scrubs with stethoscopes around their necks; they're in civilian clothes. There is a lovely atrium, a baby grand piano, computers you might want to surf through, spiffy colour televisions, and lots of complimentary treats. Normally I don't indulge in the complimentary treats but an hour and a half after arriving we were still waiting for my husband to be shown in, and I succumbed.

We'd both taken something to read and I happened to be well into Rory Stewart's The Places In Between. Rory Stewart is a well-educated, Scottish young man who must have given his poor mother apoplexy walking across the Middle East months after 9/11. He is crossing Afghanistan in this book, obligated to walk with three guards he doesn't want. He is an historian and his knowledge of Muslim customs and familiarity with the language are indispensible to his survival, as are whopping amounts of luck. There are no inns where he travels so he is dependant on the hospitality of whichever village he ends up in. The food he is offered is most often tea and naan bread. He sleeps on the floor with eight or nine other unwashed bodies. The Afghanis have no concept of what the twin towers were or why the coalition is bombing them as most of the people he meets in the countryside are illiterate.

As he sets out from Herat with the guards he is eventually able to dump, he is interviewed by a bored war correspondent from The Los Angeles Times looking for a story. Stewart tells him he is going to cross Afghanistan in the footsteps of Babur, the first Emperor of Mughal India. The photographer taking his picture asks him if he's read Into The Wild about the American boy who tried a similar venture in Alaska and died trying. But Rory Stewart is no Chris McCandless despite the simplicity of his travel and the risks he takes. He is not troubled, nor has he dropped out of society. Rather, he is painstakingly recording the life of the Afghanis in this point of time and relating it to centuries of conflict and intrigue. The result is a very engaging and thought-provoking adventure.

When my husband and I were finally released from the Cancer Clinic into the oven outside, I knew I'd never be trekking across the Middle East.

Lessons from the Depression: Eliminating Debt The Old-Fashioned Way

2009-06-19T19:43:00.010-04:00

Not too long ago it was a pretty common occurrence in this part of the country for couples to buy the biggest, most expensive house they could afford, counting on their combined incomes from jobs in the auto sector to float them along. Mortgages offering a 0% down payment further enticed people to go big. When the bubble burst in September of last year, overtime at the plants was suddenly curtailed and weeks of layoff loomed. Under incredible stress, people found it hard to think clearly about how they'd meet their financial obligations. Where do you start when you're in a situation like this? Who do you talk to?

This is the starting point for Darlene Gudrie Butts' new book Lessons from the Depression: Eliminating Debt The Old-Fashioned Way. Butts, who's been a financial advisor for the past 23 years, has written a book the average person can understand, in story format, without any charts or graphs to boggle the mind. She tells the story of Tim and Tricia and their two children who suddenly find themselves on the brink of bankruptcy. The only solution Tricia can see is to ask her grandmother for a loan. The grandmother refuses but offers them something better - the skills to rectify the problem - and Grandma really has her head together. Not only has she lived through the Great Depression but she understands the emotional ramifications of debt. Tim and Tricia find that her step-by-step approach not only rebuilds the family's finances but their interpersonal relationships as well.

Lessons from the Depression is predicated on sound financial principles but Butts has many surprising insights and useful tips that I haven't seen in other books of this nature. Even for fiscally-fit families, Lessons from the Depression is a worthwhile read. Two thumbs way, way up.

Hold the Chicken Salad

2009-06-17T08:39:00.012-04:00

Remember Jack Nicholson in the movie Five Easy Pieces in which he is unable to get a plate of toast in the diner because it's not on the menu? He gets around this by ordering a toasted chicken salad sandwich and tells the waitress to hold the chicken salad. There's a number of elderly library patrons who want me to recommend books that don't contain sex, the "f" word, or any violence. To me this is like ordering a chicken salad sandwich without the chicken salad but, hey, it's part of the job. The trouble is that once the patrons have gone through the Janette Oke and Lilian Jackson Braun novels, I have to start doing some heavy thinking. Sometimes I can't remember where the "f" word is hiding. Mary Wesley's delightful novels are disqualified because even though the patrons would love them there is the occasional sex. And sadly a lot of the very best books are out of the running when you put these qualifiers on them. Fortunately for me however, one of the book blogs I follow recently featured The Bookshop by English author Penelope Fitzgerald. It's absolutely squeaky clean and delivers a good story about a widow in the 1950s investing the money she inherits from her husband in a bookstore in a small English village. Unfortunately she buys an old haunted house that the town's wealthy matron suddenly wants for an arts' centre. To this end she subtly uses every means of influence and skullduggery possible to force the bookshop owner out, even after she establishes quite a successful enterprise. The ending is a surprise; no pat wind-up there. And, if I'm lucky, the rest of Penelope Fitzgerald's books, which I have on order, will also be devoid of sex, the "f" word, and violence so that I'll have another author to recommend to the readers who want to hold the chicken salad.

Island Living

2009-06-16T09:04:00.004-04:00

Kingsville is especially blessed. Due to repairs taking place on the Leamington dock, the ferry to Pelee Island is docking in Kingsville for the whole summer. At 8:00 o'clock this morning, as I was watering my plants, I could hear its horn signalling its first departure of the day. Normally the ferry only docks here during the month of August. What makes this summer particularly nice is that my husband and I can ride our bikes down to the dock, hop on the ferry, ride around the island until we lunch somewhere, then get home in plenty of time for dinner.

Pelee Island is very quaint, much like Ontario in the 50s. In other words, you make your own fun. There aren't any Tim Hortons, bank machines, or amusement parks and the only grocery store burnt down over the winter. Jane Christmas, a Toronto journalist, wrote a series of columns about it for The National Post when she spent a winter there recovering from a serious car accident and then turned the articles into the bestseller, The Pelee Project. She adeptly describes the culture shock in adapting to the laidback atmosphere of the island after her frenetic and often shallow existence in Toronto. A big night on the town is a community potluck dinner and movie in the Lions Hall. If you want to relax, Pelee Island is the place to do it. Margaret Atwood (Peggy to her friends) has a cottage there and hunters know the place for its fall pheasant shoot. The pheasants are bred on the island and then let loose in a very confused and complacent state. There's also quite a good summer theatre, a winery, and some bed and breakfasts and restaurants. Perfect place to cycle. For the most part the roads are paved and cut quietly through lush fields. Rather expensive cottages share a gorgeous sand beach. We try to get over at least once a year but there are a surprisingly large number of local people who have never been. I would compare it to a visit to P.E.I. without the travel stress. And the lobster, unfortunately. But it does have awesome lake perch.

Island living does take a certain type of person and there are lots of those in the recent release of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. Guernsey is a British island tucked up near the coast of France. One of the perks of living there is that you don't pay income tax. During the second world war, when this story takes place, it was occupied by the Germans and residents were reduced to making pies out of potato peels because Churchill refused to let the Red Cross drop off food and the Germans confiscated everything edible on the island. The book offers charming character studies, a little intrigue and a little romance, but mostly it focuses on the people and how they survived with grace and no small amount of humour.

Cherished Catalogues

2009-06-15T12:50:00.006-04:00

During the movie One True Thing in which Meryl Streep's character is dying of cancer, she is gluing together a mosaic table out of plates damaged when her son was "practising juggling". The end result is gorgeous. Using broken plates to make a mosaic is called pique assiette, a fact I discovered while thumbing through Martha Stewart's Encyclopedia of Crafts. The book features one such table made with what looks like Blue Willow china. It is not hard to see how a table like this would have great sentimental value. I know what it's like to have so few pieces of tableware left that you can't make a complete place setting (although nowadays hostesses are mixing tableware at their parties with excellent results). You hate to part with the remnants of a set that bring back memories of birthday parties or Thanksgiving dinners, so the idea that you can immortalize them and have a perfectly beautiful table in the end, is appealing.

Martha Stewart arrived on the scene not only as the art of homemaking was being denigrated but when there was a great danger that the skills involved were going to be lost forever. I remember fondly watching her initial television shows, shot from her farmhouse, at a time when she was apparently a harridan in real life. (Prison seems to have mellowed her even if her shows are now slick studio productions.) It's not that women are listening to Martha and suddenly making everything from scratch, but she legitimized our right to do so in a period when you can come under heavy fire for just staying home with your kids. She has also been a saving grace for the hundreds of craftspeople she has given airtime to in an era of mass production. I've saved her magazines over the years just to have a record of the right way of doing things. And, if the forecasts of life after cheap oil and the demise of globalization materialize, having the skills necessary to survive at the local level may again be given the status they deserve.

Figuring Things Out

2009-06-13T21:51:00.013-04:00

When we lived on a farm we had an old metal mailbox at the end of the lane, and, like most rural people, we got kind of handy at easing the car up beside it to pick up the mail. One day I was doing this on my way out to run a few errands. I placed the letters on the seat beside me, shut the mailbox, and pulled the minivan ahead - but I hadn't driven more than a few feet when it stopped dead in its tracks. I pressed on the gas. Nothing happened. Finally I gave up trying to move it and got out to see what was going on. What I discovered was that as I was driving away, the corner of the mailbox had impaled itself on the minivan and opened up the side from stem to stern like a can of tuna. I was in shock. I ran across the lawn to the house and was so hysterical I was unable to explain to my husband what had happened. This was completely out of character for me and he was mystified and deeply concerned. Finally I dragged him out so that he could see what I was crying about. Imagine a streak of shredded metal across two doors and a fender. This was going to be expensive and underneath the tears I was trying to do the math. Yet my husband didn't think it was that big a deal compared to the amount of grief I was putting myself under. I thought perhaps he didn't understand the situation. Why wasn't he as upset as I was? The answer to that question is revealed in Steve Harvey's book Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man.

According to Harvey, a guy's first instinct is to protect the woman he loves, so if she's okay all he's concerned about is fixing the problem. Which in this case meant prying the minivan off the mailbox and driving it down to the body shop. Bing, bang, boom. He'll deal with the bill later. This is a man professing his love for his woman. Which means that if a woman is expecting her man to profess his love to her the way she does to him, she's going to have a long wait. Men do it differently.

This book is getting a lot of attention now, especially from women who are looking for a guy and asking themselves, "What Do Men Want?". (I know, men are asking, "What Do Women Want?" but that's another book.) Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man gets 4 */4 * simply for letting women in on the secret.

A glorious Friday for memoir!

2009-06-05T18:31:00.014-04:00

This is the awesome beauty of the Hillman Marsh this fine spring day. Two weeks ago the Marsh was a goose nursery. Today there were only a handful of geese standing on rocks in the water. One thing I love about the Marsh is that there's always something going on. Last night must have been a rough one. The first evidence was a mess of goose feathers that had survived a struggle. Next we came upon a blob of intestines and the head of what was presumably a gopher. The rest of the body was absent. But as usual, there were lots of live animals: huge fish swimming in circles and jumping out of the water, turtles ducking underwater, a long snake in our path, egrets and herons and red-winged blackbirds and surprised frogs leaping for cover. Immediately the dogs ran through the grasses and dove into black, tarry muck that took a few more swims to wash off. On previous outings they've brought back ticks that latch onto our ears, so they are bathed as soon as we get home. The Marsh was all ours today and it was heaven. To celebrate, I drank a chocolate milkshake made with real ice cream with my kraut dog at the marina.

I came across The Mighty Queens of Freeville in one of the book blogs I follow. The author, Amy Dickinson, has been hired by the Chicago Tribune to replace Ann Landers and has written the story of her upbringing in a tiny upper-New-York-state village called Freeville. She is apparently well-known in the U.S. but The Windsor Star cancelled the syndicated column when Ann Landers died so I'm not familiar with the advice she gives. She and her family have certainly had their share of 'man-done-me-wrong' experiences though, and that background, along with raising a daughter on her own, has no doubt broadened her outlook on life. Contrary to the rave reviews this book is receiving, I thought that Freeville provided a captivating canvas that could have taken a bit more paint. Freeville is where Dickinson keeps a house away from her apartment in Chicago and her family connections there have provided the glue for her and her daughter over the years. I grew up like that in Windsor with all the grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins in the same city. In those days it was possible to go right through school with the same kids because very few people moved out of town. There is the same promise of continuity and warmth in The Mighty Queens of Freeville but the author is too quick to dart in and out without exploring all the colours and moods. (This is not a story about the gay community, by the way. The "mighty queens" are the women in Dickinson's life who had to forge lives for themselves and their children after their husbands left them.) Additional pictures and biography can be found at: http://www.mightyqueens.com/ .

Diner Indulgences

2009-05-31T07:49:00.009-04:00

Is it rude to read at the table if your partner is also reading at the table? We don't think so. In fact, after a recent dinner out our waitress confessed to me that she was hoping to find someone just like my husband who wouldn't mind picking up a book himself if she happened to want to read at the table. I wished her good luck at finding a husband like mine.

Sunday mornings at the diner, after we solve the world's problems with the other regulars, we polish off our breakfasts as quickly as possible so that we can get back into our books. Today I was reading David Foster's autobiography, Hitman - David Foster being the composer/producer who brought along Josh Groban and Celine Dion and wrote the music for several movies including The Bodyguard. Having a limited understanding of music myself, I appreciated the entry into this unusual world populated with incredibly talented people. Foster was brought up in a modest home on Vancouver Island and by the age of 15 was making more money than his father. If you were to graph his life I think it would look a lot like the stock market over the last fifteen years, minus September 2008 to present - in other words, a considerable number of surges and regressions along a steep incline. Naturally, being a workaholic and on the road a good part of the time, his domestic life suffered, to the tune of three marriages and five daughters from four different women. As interesting as it was reading about Foster's life though, it was equally fascinating reading the insider gossip on other musicians whose names I recognize (and this is a very small list). For instance, I didn't know that Andrea Bocelli, the Italian tenor, has been blind since he was twelve years old. And I gather that Foster did not think that Paul McCartney lived his life as grandly as his fame and wealth would warrant. Linda was still alive and she and Paul kept a rather ordinary five-bedroom house. After an all-day composing session, Linda served the group soy burgers right from the stove family-style. Unlike Foster, I like that image. And here's what he has to say about Alice Cooper: "He was an unusual and impressive guy. Every morning, Alice would get out of bed, have breakfast with his kids, kiss his wife good-bye, drive the kids to school, play a round of golf, then show up at the studio and work his ass off with me, and that night he'd be at the arena in front of ten thousand fans, decapitating chickens." As I said, an unusual world.

The "New" Globe and Mail

2009-05-30T08:54:00.005-04:00

A good part of our Saturday mornings is spent reading the weekend edition of The Globe and Mail. Four or five months ago, the Globe redecorated and I feel familiar enough with it now to comment on the changes.

Without skirting around the issue, I will say that the biggest loss has been that glorious magazine-style section called Books. This was a literary bible. This was what I pulled out one Saturday and spent a few ecstatic moments jumping up and down screaming at when the review of my book came out. This was the section of the paper that I squirrelled away every week after the rest of the paper hit the recycle box. This is the one I read and reread in case I'd missed anything. And it's gone. The standard newspaper section that replaced it, Focus & Books, has none of that excitement. It isn't the content that's wrong, it's the format. A couple of features that have been added, The WHO'S READING WHAT column written by various celebrities and writers, and CLUBLAND, which profiles bookclubs around the country, are plum additions. So are the on-line features advertised: Martin Levin's book blog and author interviews. All good stuff. I say they take all of the new, along with the wonderful reviews, and put them back into their old magazine format and make everything right again. As it is, it's an apology. It's The Globe and Mail relegating all of us who love books, whether we're reading them or writing them, to the back pages, and I, for one, felt the slap. Now Section F hits the recycle box along with the rest of the newspaper because it's unmanageable and meant to be forgettable.

Hubbie's Latest Reads

2009-05-29T21:45:00.006-04:00

There seems to be a lot of mountain-climbing books piled up by my husband's chair. The latest, The Climb of My Life is the story of thirty-year-old climber, Kelly Perkins, who conquered the Matterhorn, Mt. Fuji, and Kilimanjaro, after surviving a heart transplant. This is one of those inspirational "triumph-over-adversity" testimonials that can't help but touch your heart.

Next, he jumped into a climbing spoof called Into Hot Air: Mounting Mount Everest by Chris Elliot, which despite its billing as "a hilarious parody of epic literary adventures", has taken top spot as the worst book he's ever read. Unfortunately it was an impulse buy so he can't even take it back to the library.

Currently on tap is View From The Summit by Sir Edmund Hillary, who acknowledges looking for evidence that George Mallory had made it to the top when he reached the summit in 1953. I had always assumed that Hillary was English but, in fact, he's from New Zealand. Twenty years ago I had the privilege of standing beside him as we waited for an elevator in Toronto. He generously lent his name to many fundraising events and was a compelling speaker. I imagine that he still exudes a certain weatherbeaten energy. And that's all I can throw in here that's even remotely connected to climbing, having been born with a fear of heights.

Jeffrey Archer

2009-05-28T21:34:00.006-04:00

I must say, I enjoyed this book as much as my husband did. Jeffrey Archer tells a good story. Paths of Glory is the account of George Mallory's life and his two bids to reach the summit of Mt. Everest. Mallory was a gifted and fearless climber who had only two women in his life: his wife, Ruth, and Mt. Everest. The first was loyal and steadfast; the latter was whimsical and deadly. His early ambitions to climb the mountain were thwarted by World War I but he survived combat and headed up two expeditions sponsored by the Royal Geographic Society, the same Society that sent Sir Robert Scott to the South Pole. There is speculation that Mallory succeeded in reaching the summit of Mt. Everest in his second attempt (which would have placed him ahead of Sir Edmund Hillary) but fell on the descent, breaking his leg. His body and that of his climbing partner, Sandy Irvine, were not found until 1999. Thanks to Archer's engaging writing, all of the characters in this tale are vivid and appealing.

A Light Summer Read

2009-05-25T08:47:00.003-04:00

Harlan Coben's new book, Long Lost is another engrossing page-turner from a specialist in maintaining dramatic tension. Also a pro at this is Stephenie Meyer, the author of the Twilight series. Although Coben and Meyer write different types of books, they've both mastered the art of getting the reader to turn to the next page, which is no mean feat. They have us eating the peanuts out of their hand.

Journals and Biographies

2009-05-24T07:36:00.006-04:00

Wild Mary: A Life of Mary Wesley by Patrick Marnham was delightful. She lived, as they say, in interesting times, and she lived it large. She was, in short, a spitfire - sassy and unconventional - vacillating between periods of great wealth and decades of deprivation. The period during the Second World War is particularly interesting. The war experience for the British, being in the thick of things and more immediate than Canadians could imagine, was both frightful and bawdy. Several of Mary's friends were spies, bombs were falling indiscriminately, and expected annihilation had people taking up unlikely liaisons. And, boy, did Mary Wesley have spunk! Even better, widowed and destitute at age 70, she parlayed her wild life into bestselling novels. Harnessing Peacocks was her third and I found it a wonderful read. Few novelists can write sex with such candour. But back to the interesting times. Anyone who was born in the early 1900s and lived to a ripe old age can attest to the extraordinary changes wrought by two world wars and the depression. Agatha Christie's An Autobiography is another perfect testimonial to these times. And the profound changes technology brought to the world are further evidenced in Lucy Maud Montomery's five journals. Even the most demure of these women lived with vigour.

At A Loss for Words

2009-05-16T20:13:00.005-04:00

Not me, of course. That's the title of a book. By Canadian writer, Diane Schoemperlen. I love tiny little books with white covers. It'd been strategically placed at eye level at Indigo just to reel me in. And as I plucked it off the shelf I was sure I had read something by this author before, but the titles of her other books, which were listed at the front, didn't sound familiar. So I did what I always do in Indigo, unless I'm travelling, and I wrote down the name and author in my address book and slipped the book carefully back on the shelf. This doesn't mean that I'm not going to buy the book. I just happen to know that almost everything at Indigo is cheaper from their on-line bookstore. And I mean CHEAPER! A new release can be $10.00 to $15.00 cheaper. But, even before I resorted to on-line ordering, I checked our library's database to see if we had it. And sure enough, we did. In the same library I work in. I brought the lovely little book home and was only three pages in when I realized that it had been the book of Diane Schoemperlen's that I had read, and loved. Having had several relationships like the one she describes, I had no trouble relating to the story. What I found so astounding is that she tips you off as to why it turned out the way it did and what was happening with the other party. I should have read this, along with He's Just Not That Into You, when I was twelve. Little books like this are punchy. They have so few words, they have to be. Consider other punchy little books like The Reader or A Three Dog Life. They fit in handbags and make great stocking stuffers and book clubs love them because members will actually read them. In fact, while they're trying to decide whether it will be worth their while to continue reading, they've read half the book! Before Indigo revokes my membership card, I would just like to add that although the above procedure for getting a book sounds like a lot of work, it happens because I generally don't buy books I haven't read. After all, I'm establishing a collection at my house and if I don't keep things under control, I'm going to have to saw the legs off the coffee table and prop it up with books!

Book Notes

2009-05-15T18:11:00.010-04:00

I must say that Still Alice by Lisa Genova lived up to its billing. Genova, who has a PH.D. in Neuroscience from Harvard, approached the National Alzheimer's Association when the book was still in manuscript form, got its seal of approval and decided to self-publish Still Alice rather than waste time trying to find an agent. The book quickly jumped to the bestseller list and was bought by Simon & Schuster. Genova's advice to aspiring writers is to skip the fretting, self-doubt, and rejection inherent in finding an agent and publish their work themselves. This can be done quite easily now for less than the cost of a round-trip ticket to Vancouver and there are lots of companies out there. Here are some off the top of my head: http://www.lulu.com/; http://www.iuniverse.com/; http://www.volumesdirect.com/; http://www.traffordpublishing.net/; http://www.booksurge.com/; http://www.authorhouse.com. I'll add more as I come across them. Genova also quotes Diablo Cody, the Oscar-winning writer of Juno, giving the same advice to new screenwriters on a radio talk show.

My husband's pick of the day: Jeffrey Archer's new book Paths of Glory, the story of the British climber, George Mallory, who attempted Mt. Everest in 1924 and whose frozen body was discovered 600 feet from the summit in 1999. The big question is, was he on his way up, or on his way down?

Esquire Fiction Contest

2009-05-14T19:01:00.003-04:00

If you can remember the days when magazines published top-notch fiction pieces instead of those tiresome victim testimonials, you're at least as old as I am. Now Esquire magazine has made a commitment to get back into the game and to that end is holding a short-story contest with a twist. Writers must use one of three titles they provide: 1. "Twenty-Ten" (a date); 2. "An Insurrection" (a thing); or, 3. "Never, Ever Bring This Up Again" (a statement). First prize is US$2,500 and publication in the magazine. Details can be found at www.esquire.com/fiction/fiction-contest . Basically, keep it under 4,000 words and get it in by August 1st.

Where are the books that make you split your sides laughing?

2009-05-14T18:34:00.008-04:00

Last year I found one of them displayed on a table in a Toronto Indigo store. It was a self-published tome called The Best Laid Plans by Terry Fallis, a riotously funny Canadian political satire. Fallis, who is no stranger to the Ottawa scene, shopped the manuscript around to the traditional commercial publishers without any luck (which makes you wonder what kind of standards they're working with) so he published it himself through http://www.iuniverse.com/. Continuing in that spirit of gritty determination, he submitted the book to the 2008 Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour competition and won the $15,000 prize. That sparked the interest of McClelland & Stewart who bought the rights and then took off Fallis' great cover and replaced it with a clearly inferior one. No matter. Nobody I know has been able to read this book without laughing out loud so it's my No. 1 pick for the "split-your-sides-laughing" prize. Read a complete account of the journey of The Best Laid Plans from the author himself at http://www.terryfallis.com/.

This year's winner of the Stephen Leacock award was Mark Leiren-Young for Never Shoot a Stampede Queen: A Rookie Reporter in the Cariboo, a memoir with some very memorable characters drawn from Leiren-Young's experiences in the B.C. Interior.

And the other nominees were: William Deverell's Kill All the Judges; Kiss the Joy As It Flies by Sheree Fitch (who's featured at this year's Lakefield Literary Festival in July); Uproar by Jack MacLeod; and, Charles Wilkins' In the Land of the Long Fingernails. You can find out more about these at the Leacock web-site: http://www.leacock.ca/ .

What I brought home from the library today ...

2009-05-13T18:17:00.014-04:00

Wild Mary, A Life of Mary Wesley by Patrick Marnham - the story of Mary Wesley who published her first novel when she was seventy years old and wrote nine dazzling bestsellers, one of which, The Camomile Lawn, was made into a TV series. Candid, sexy, eccentric, and the owner of a rackety life, this is my kind of woman.

Still Alice by Lisa Genova - the portrayal of a university professor's descent into dementia in her own voice. Highly recommended.

The Reader by Bernhard Schlink - not new but still powerful and very topical since the release of the movie. Pair it with Markus Zusak's The Book Thief to understand how Hitler manipulated the German people to do the unthinkable.

What To Read When by Pam Allyn - a summary guide on what to read with your kids concerning every conceivable situation: sleepovers, separation, making a mistake, loneliness, bullying ... An invaluable reference guide for parents, librarians, and teachers.

Erie Street

2009-05-12T20:37:00.004-04:00

Not long ago a friend of mine was staying in Windsor on business and asked the concierge of her hotel where the downtown was. Sadly, he replied, "There is no more downtown, ma'am." How true. But there is Erie Street! After renewing my health card at City Hall Square, I had some time to kill and decided to have lunch at one of Erie Street's excellent restaurants. The restaurants are so unquestionably exquisite that you can just walk down the street and pick one without having to worry about being disappointed. Unfortunately I was between the lunch sitting and the dinner sitting so I missed this wonderful experience. Instead, I dropped into a cafe and the manager suggested I get some food from the bakery next door and bring it over to her place to eat. I ended up with a panini stuffed with thin slices of provolone and prosciutto and small pastry. Back at the cafe I topped that off with a cappucino and spent a lovely half hour reading Ruth Reichl's new book, "Not Becoming My Mother". Reichl has spent her life making food her passion. She was the restaurant critic for The New York Times before taking over as editor of Gourmet magazine. Her books about these experiences are very entertaining, but this one is really a tribute to her mother, a brilliant woman who never got to fulfill her ambition of being a doctor because her family thought she'd never get a husband that way. This thwarted ambition has driven Ruth to carve an incredibly busy but fulfilling career for herself, deaf to anybody's notions of what would be best for her. On the way home from Erie Street I stopped at Willistead Park to see the rose garden, but because of the month-long strike of city workers, the gardens have not been planted and the lawn is a riot of dandelions going to seed. The only good thing to come out of the strike is that I didn't have to pay for parking anywhere, because the meter readers are on the picket line too!

Today's Book

2009-05-12T09:18:00.002-04:00

The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway, a Canadian writer who teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser. I was prepared not to like the book, but couldn't. He manages to convey the limited lives playing themselves out amidst the senseless destruction of the city with a blunt honesty about the choices people make to guard their humanity.

The bounty of the County

2009-05-11T17:23:00.004-04:00

Yesterday, being Mother's Day, the restaurants were jammed. We chose to celebrate at home with fresh produce from the farmers' stands: asparagus, tomatoes, new potatoes. This year the Essex County Federation of Agriculture brought out a map of area producers so that people can go straight to the farm to buy. It wasn't until I moved away from Essex County for a while that I understood how blessed we are to be able to do this. And now we know where to go! Fast, fresh, homegrown, and so much cheaper than the supermarket!

http://www.ecfa.ca/main/index.php?page=buylocal.php

Is there such a thing as too much fresh air?

2009-05-11T16:58:00.007-04:00

My husband and I took the dogs for a walk at Hillman Marsh this afternoon, competing with birdwatchers with high-powered binoculars. This is a glorious walk, 4.5 km. through the marsh on top of a raised dyke. There is water on both sides so there is no place for the dogs to go, but for the safety of the little ducklings and goslings who can't fly yet, we kept them on the leash. Today we saw several blue herons, lots of Canada Geese - two with 30 babies swimming after them - turtles sunning themselves, bright yellow birds they call "lemons" here, a swan, and, of course, since I'm not knowledgeable, many species of birds I can't identify. I am sufficiently intrigued by the birders' enthusiasm though to get involved ... if we could just remember to take the camera and binoculars with us! Our treat after the walk is to stop at the Leamington Marina for a kraut dog with mustard. Afterwards I came home and tried to reread Joyce Carol Oates' journal for inspiration, but conked out on the sunporch sofa.

For information on the Hillman Marsh click here: www.erca.org/conservation/area.hillman_marsh.cfm

Lakefield Literary Festival

2009-05-04T20:36:00.003-04:00

www.lakefieldliteraryfestival.com
July 17th, 18th, 19th

Of all the events, here are my picks:

EAST COAST TALES
Friday night at 8:00 p.m.
Shelagh Rogers opens the Festival at the Bryan Jones Theatre at Lakefield College School
Readings by East Coast authors Donna Morrissey and Sheree Fitch

DEATH IN THE AFTERNOON
Saturday afternoon at 2:00 p.m., Bryan Jones Theatre
Authors Andrew Pyper, Louise Penny, and Pat Capponi will be speaking.

DINNER, Lakefield College School Dining Room
Drinks start at 4:45 p.m.; Dinner at 7:30 p.m.
Jocelyn Laurence presents: Remembering Margaret Laurence

INTERPRETING THE HUMAN HEART
Saturday night at 7:45 p.m., Bryan Jones Theatre
Featured authors: Alistair MacLeod and Nino Ricci

WOMEN IN THE WILDERNESS
Sunday afternoon at 2:30 p.m., Whatley barn on Casement Lane
Drew Hayden Taylor hosts authors Gil Adamson and Alissa York

This great festival is sold out early.