Old Year/New Year

Since tidying it up a few days ago I've been really taken with this little corner of my office. (The rest of the room remains much less photogenic.) On the desk is one of my Christmas gifts, The Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition. Look out, manuscripts. I've got a thousand+ pages of authority at my fingertips. And it's current.

I love making New Year's resolutions and I think this year I'll include building myself a better editorial/biblio resource library at home. Chicago, of course, will have a place of honour (maybe even a little stand). I'll also want to upgrade my house dictionary from my mum's 1954 Oxford Concise, sans spine, to the newest Oxford Canadian. And if the Dalhousie library system is determined to stick to its three renewal limit, I'm going to need the History of the Book in Canada set, which I mentioned last post but have made only a very small dent in since. Hmm. What else?

The Zs

I found out several months ago that it was possible to use my public library card at the university libraries in the province, and this weekend I finally wandered over to the Killam Library at Dalhousie University to fill out the necessary paperwork. Then I braved the hoards of Ugg boots and withering undergrad stares until I located my favourite section: the Zs – Bibliography and Library Science.

I was looking for the first volume of the mammoth The History of the Book in Canada, a major research project that (I think) wound up a few years ago and resulted in three large volumes of essays and an online database. I have been doing some very amateurish research into early book publishing in BC and a librarian acquaintance suggested I check this out. He also recommended Ocean Paper Stone by Robert Bringhurst (1984), and while I was in the neighbourhood I found Influences on California Printing by James D. Hart and Ward Ritchie (1970). I mentioned Ward Ritchie in another post, as a printer I'd been interested in. The whole California printing and publishing scene fascinates me, as it seems to be, or at one time have been, surrounded by a fairly vibrant community of librarians (including Lawrence Clark Powell) and enthusiast societies who held talks and published various ephemeral items of their own.

Three more days at the office and then I can dig into all my new finds (and the baking and the brie and the antipasto).

Winter Survival

I’ve mentioned before my love of travel literature (on the nightstand right now is Paul Theroux’s first railway saga The Great Railway Bazaar). My other escape genre is the DIY/cheap living/how-I-dropped-out-of-society-and-lived-to-love-it treatise. Although book editing is a pretty good gig, Christmas and winter both make me especially susceptible to the gospel of simple, jobless living. I thought I’d share a few titles that I have not yet read but that will likely be in this winter’s lineup, in case you want to read along.



First is Possum Living by Dolly Freed, which was published in 1978 when the author was in her late teens. Her father quit his job and pulled her out of high school, and the book is her story of how they got by on little to no money and what she did with all the time she had to self-educate. It has experienced a recent resurgence with a new edition released by Tin House Books in Portland, Oregon, last year. Dolly also has a blog, which I see is on hiatus now but has included some interesting reflections on her old life.



Second is Novella Carpenter’s Farm City, published last year. I read a review and then devoured every last post on her blog and have still not got around to buying the book – I intend to remedy that soon. For the past several years Carpenter has squatted an empty lot in Oakland, California, raising goats and chickens, gardening, and hosting classes on such things. She is ambitious but also very frank about her failures. She also makes no bones about enjoying life in the city and is not a purist back-to-the-lander in that regard, which I find quite refreshing. She’s a journalist, too, and has interviewed some like-minded people, including…



...Philip Garlington, whose book Rancho Costa Nada: The Dirt Cheap Desert Homestead (2003) has been out of print for a few years and goes for about $60 on Abe. Garlington was also a journalist who, back in the 1980s, quit his job and moved onto a $300 piece of Nevada desert. He doesn’t actually recommend the lifestyle, but it combines two of my favourites, deserts and dropping out, so I can’t resist.

In the meantime, presents need wrapping and the job needs going to.

So You Want to Write a Novel

An editor friend sent this along and it completely slayed me. If you've ever told me you were working on a book and received an unimpressed squint in return, it is because this video is not much of an exaggeration in terms of some of the expectations of a particularly naive brand of aspiring writer. The makers of this nailed so many of the finer details. Clearly an inside job.

Atkinson at last

After almost a month of waiting, my copy of Kate Atkinson's new book, Started Early, Took My Dog, finally arrived at Bookmark. I was in Chapters the week before for David Sedaris's reading and dutifully did not buy it there. The wait was worth it (although I made good use of that time calling them twice, stopping by twice in person and giving them both my home and work phone numbers). I read the first few chapters Sunday night and then did a marathon on Monday night, stopping only to spoon cold leftovers into a bowl around 9 p.m. I missed Louise Monroe, the cranky Scottish detective, conspicuously absent, but Jackson Brodie is in good form. And...has taken up reading poetry, which makes this latest installment a bit more like the early Kate Atkinson. Split the lark!

Emotionally Weird, her third novel, remains my favourite and the one I recommend most to people I've decided need to partake in the Atkinson obsession. It's odd to see an author you've liked since their pre-mass-popularity days become massively popular. But if you're going to be a snob about reading the fun's gone out of it, right?

In an interview I read recently Atkinson said she's ready to move on from Jackson Brodie and I'll be curious to see what she does next. In the meantime, though, I see from her website that a Jackson Brodie BBC mini-series is in the works. To watch or not to watch? I love these characters. I don't know if I'm ready.

Although it's not a thoroughly positive review, this one from the Guardian gives a good overview of the feel of the whole quartet, for the uninitiated.

To Cariboo & Back in 1862

I mentioned a few posts back that I'd found an interesting limited-edition letterpress book on my visit to Powell's in Portland last month. When I pulled it from the shelf and saw the price ($9.95) I was certain I was having my own little "Gutenberg Bible at the garage sale" moment, but when I did a quick Abe search back at the hotel room I discovered that no, in fact, $9.95 was about the most any of the 350 copies in the edition were going for. That I hadn't heard of the book before should probably have been a tip-off, but I can be moronically optimistic at times. However, both the subject and the publisher interest me, so I'm pleased to have it anyway. (And if I ever need ten bucks...)



The book opens with not one but three introductions explaining the source of the narrative and the various people involved in bringing it back into print. Briefly, W. Champness recorded his impressions during a relatively short stint (he leaves England in the spring and is back in Victoria by December) in the Cariboo and had them published serially, along with sketches, in the April 1865 issues of a weekly magazine called The Leisure Hour. In the late 1960s/early 70s Gordon Bowes of the British Columbia Historical Association initiated a project to have Champness's articles reprinted in book format, and approached Glen Adams of Ye Galleon Press in Fairfield, Washington, whose workshop press was in the business of bringing back into print these sorts of things. The book was released in 1972, as far as I can tell in the edition of 350 that I have, and in a slightly less limited edition of 1,000 though I haven't yet been able to determine what the difference between those two might be.



Champness and his nephew travelled from England by boat to the Panama Canal, then by rail, then by steamer ship up to San Francisco, then to Victoria, across to New Westminster, then by boat up the Fraser River, and then on foot with pack horses into the Cariboo. Their guides and supplies for the last part of the trip came from Lillooet (which Champness spells Lilooett), my hometown. He writes a lot about expenses. The further into the interior the party goes, the more expensive everything becomes, which was no doubt part of the reason his time in the Cariboo was so short. Their group spent a total of two weeks at their destination, Antler Creek, and Champness dedicates just one paragraph to it! But the trip back to the coast is quite interesting in terms of his observations about the settlements and his predictions for their growth. And at Lytton they are invited to spend the night in a pit house, which he describes in (for him) quite a bit of detail.

So, not exactly the serendipitous rare find I thought at first, but definitely something I'm glad to have around, and from a printer I'd been curious about.

Johanna & the Giller

My sentiments exactly.

Marsh Ledger

I was in the Annapolis Valley last weekend and although I have been quite enjoying city living since moving to Halifax in January, the visit reminded me how great it is to be able to walk a few minutes down the street and suddenly be out of town. I haven't posted a poem here in a while, so I thought I'd share this one, part of a series on the dykelands outside Wolfville, where I used to walk several times a week.

5.
What they come for:
for the pipers it is shrimp,
full when they leave our mud,
half weight by Surinam.
For the shrimp, diatoms,
diatoms, dying spartina,
that blowsy grass that tufts
its way along the dyke, tightening
into funks, boy hair always at odds.
These quiet altercations
writ over and over:
what I come for.

Kate Atkinson

One more day until the new Kate Atkinson novel, Started Early, Took My Dog, is released in Canada. Warning to all other books in my stack: You are about to experience a bout of fierce neglect. But I can promise it won't be for long.

October's reads and buys

Oh, hi. Oh, hell, more like it. I went home, I came back, things got a bit busy. Here's a little update on some of my readings & buyings since my last dispatch:

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
I was about a hundred pages from the end of Jonathan Franzen's new novel, Freedom (which has been reviewed pretty exhaustively all over the place, so I won't get into it here), when I left for Vancouver and couldn't quite rationalize lugging it along. So I left it in Halifax and bought a very beat-up copy of The Adventures..., which includes the first twelve Holmes stories, from the airport bookstore during my stopover in Toronto. Although I'm sure I appear anything but, I always feel oddly streamlined when I travel alone, and mysteries with aloof, intrepid sleuths seem to fit my mood while skulking around airports. Although the tight turnaround of each case is pretty satisfying, I'm keen now to check out Holmes in novel length.

Stranger Wycott's Place by John Schreiber
I found this in one of my dad's little piles of papers during my visit home. It was published a couple of years ago in New Star Books' Transmontanus series, which consists mainly of short, oddball books on various aspects of BC history and culture. This one is in the Don McKay vein of creative non-fiction, combining archival research with long tromps around the grasslands in the Cariboo region, a little north of where my parents live. There are some frustrating lapses into bland, non-specific niceties about place and connectedness that seemed more borrowed than really lived, but when he's out walking or immersed in the trail of patchy family records, piecing together Wycott's story, Schreiber's writing is quite sharp. He's also provided a good basic Cariboo reading list at the back, which I plan to revisit soonish.

Lost River by James Tate
The September issue of Poetry included an essay by Tony Hoagland recommending Tate as a poet "trafficking in disorientation" but with a strong narrative bent, and so he was on my list when I went to Powell's in Portland, Oregon. Well, actually, first I told myself I wouldn't start in the poetry section because that was where I got stuck for most of my first visit there last summer. Three hours later I realized I done the very same thing. Lost River is a Quarternote chapbook from Sarabande Books in Louisville, Kentucky. I like chapbooks and there aren't that many publishers doing them, so I picked this over the full-length collections nearby. Tate's sensibilities had me from the start. Here are the first few lines from a poem called "Making the Best of the Holidays":

Justine called on Christmas day to say she
was thinking of killing herself. I said, "We're
in the middle of opening presents, Justine...


Before I left Powell's I did squeeze in a quick jog through the North American history section, where I found a very cool letterpress book that will have its own post sometime soon(er than later).

The Anthologist

Whew. What a week. Three book launches, Word on the Street, some recuperative vegging to follow, and now where was I? The Anthologist. Briefly: everything I'd hoped a novel about poetry would be. Paul Chowder is narrator, tour guide, largely washed-up but oddly inspiring New England poet mired in the challenge of writing an introduction to an anthology of rhyming poetry. The book is a fascinating defense of formal poetry and a very apt portrait of a poet writing today. It was an indulgent read for me, full of discussion of poetics and trappings of writing life. And so funny, too, all of which is a tall order.

My copy was borrowed from a friend who teaches a first-year university poetry course and it was fun to try to guess what she might be planning to teach from each of the pages she'd folded over. What she could have taught: meter, a basic who's-who of American poets, how to blast through a bout of writer's block. It's all there.

Because I am feeling rather lazy tonight, in lieu of any more of my less-than-inspired thoughts on the matter, I offer instead this great nine-minute recording of Nicholson Baker talking about the process of writing the book:



*

On Wednesday I head home to BC for an extra-long Thanksgiving and then down to Portland, Oregon. I hope to stop off at some bookstores in my travels. First, the very new Sitka Books & Art in Vancouver, just opened last month by one of the former owners of Duthie's Books which finally, sadly closed its last store earlier this year. Also Powell's City of Books in Portland where I will likely while away most of a day. Can't wait.

One fall launch and one Giller long list

A couple of bits of local-ish book news:

First, Allan Donaldson's new novel, The Case Against Owen Williams, will be launching at Westminster Books in Fredericton this Thursday night at 7:00pm. The book's been getting some good reviews, so if you're in the neighbourhood I hope you'll come hear Allan read. He'll also be in Halifax next month. The full book description can be found here, on the Nimbus site.

Second, I was thrilled today to see a book I worked on last year, Scotsburn, NS, author Johanna Skibsrud's debut novel, The Sentimentalists, on this year's Giller Prize long list. It's great both to see Johanna's (amazing) book on there and to see some small presses in the mix (including Gaspereau, Coach House and Biblioasis). The full list is here.

In other news I borrowed Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist (remember book club?) from a friend and roared through it in a couple of sittings this weekend. I'll be back with more to say on that very soon.

Elizabeth Bishop

Work has been occupying all my desk-sitting, typing inclinations for the last little while here, so I thought I'd share a bit of what I've been up to 9 to 5. One of the books I've been editing recently is a short biography of Elizabeth Bishop by Sandra Barry, scheduled for release next spring. Bishop has generally been understood to be an American poet. She was born and died there, served a term as Poet Laureate, and won the Pulitzer Prize. But her mother's family were from Nova Scotia and she spent formative years here, and many of her poems draw on that time. So there's been a growing movement to have her better recognized as a Nova Scotian--hence the book.

When I first started reading Sandra's manuscript, I realized how much I liked Bishop's poetry, and at the same time how little of it I'd actually read. So I've decided to do what Bishop herself advised doing with poets one likes, and read all her published work. I've started not at the beginning, but with what was handiest, the one collection I already own, her last, called Geography III. It contains a few of her best-known poems, including "The Moose" and "In the Waiting Room." I think what I like most about Bishop's work, probably what a lot of people like about it, is the thinking out loud she does toward figuring out her own sense of being, of being a person separate from others, and toward formulating the best descriptions of things. There is some conversational fumbling that happens right on the page, and in the process she manages an intimacy without getting gossipy. Even if you're not a poetry reader, I recommend checking out her work. You might be surprised.

The publication of the biography coincides with the celebrations planned for Bishop's centenary. If you're already a Bishop fan or if you want to know more, the Bishop Society of Nova Scotia has set up a frequently updated blog, with all sorts of interesting reading--musings from some of the artists who have stayed at the Elizabeth Bishop House in Great Village, NS, and posts by Sandra and other Society members about Bishop's life and work, with a focus on her Nova Scotia connection: elizabethbishopcentenary.blogspot.com

The Klondike Quest

Toward the end of a Value Village trip a couple of months ago I found a copy of The Klondike Quest, and although the dust jacket and binding were both a bit beaten up, it's a nice collection of photos to have around, so I decided to grab it. The text is by Pierre Berton and the design by Frank Newfeld (former art director and VP at McClelland & Stewart, Alligator Pie illustrator extraordinaire and more recently author of a memoir, Drawing on Type, also on my to-read list). Barbara Sears did the photo research and although I don't know anything else about her, photo research is task I have recently discovered I loathe and it must have been a monster job for this book, so she gets special mention here. I haven't read it all the way through, but it's in my bedside stack and I like paging through the photos when I'm between books or too tired for a proper before-bed read.

The town where I grew up was on the Gold Rush Trail and I was kind of weary of the subject by the time I moved away for university. Or weary, at least, of the various efforts to resuscitate its allure for the tourist market. Efforts which included planting gold-painted boulders and plywood cancan dancers on the town's outskirts. You get the idea. I've more or less made peace with the tackiness but it took me a long while to regain any appetite for books or movies to do with that era. However, in addition to The Klondike Quest, I have also lately begun watching the HBO show Deadwood, which aired a few years ago. Along with the period costumes and grit, which are their own draw I suppose, the show has exceptional dialogue. A far cry from the script used in the reenactments (oh yes, there were those too) put on every summer in our fair village. Printing enthusiasts will also appreciate the scenes that take place in the shop of the town's newspaper publisher and job printer A. W. Merrick (one of the handful of characters based on real people, in case you feel like diving down that rabbit hole).

So things have been right pioneering around here lately. But it's still hot and I do intend to get back to the remainder of the summer book club list before the season's out. Just you wait.

Narrating

The other day I came across an essay by American poet Tony Hoagland, called "Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment." It originally appeared in a 2006 issue of Poetry magazine, and is available on their website. Well worth reading if you're interested in some of the current debate about what might characterize (at least a part of) the current poetic era.

I've been mulling the question of narrative in poetry for a good while now, both in relation to my own work and in my reading of other poets. My own work tends to fall really naturally into a "Once upon a time" kind of lilt, and in the face of a lot of the more associative, less "I" driven work being published lately, I've often felt compelled to rethink my inclinations. Do I write this way because it comes naturally or because I'm too lazy or not a strong enough poet to jog myself out of it? The conclusion I've come to is that at this point, anyway, this is the position from which the work I'm happiest with comes, and that if the things I find myself interested in writing about present themselves as stories then my job is to try to shape the strongest narratives I can, rather than try to bash them into ghazal-like series of sideways glances. (Both the ghazals and the glances being entirely respectable modes, but decidedly not mine.)

Noah Richler's beach reads

Speaking (as I was last post) about books and place, I've been following the Globe and Mail's "My Books, My Place" series for the last several weeks. Some are more interesting takes on the pairing than others. Lisa Moore's this weekend was a goody, I thought. And last weekend I was delighted to see Fredericton author Allan Donaldson's first novel Maclean (2005) perched on a dozing Noah Richler's chest as one of his beach reads. You can find the article here. This spring I had the pleasure of working with Allan on his new novel, a literary mystery called The Case Against Owen Williams, which is at the printer now and will launch next month. Full book description can be found here.

Islands of Books, and the "book book" sub-genre

I am officially playing hooky from book club. It's been two weeks now and although I have technically started Infinite Jest and it does indeed appear to be worth reading, I can't seem to commit to carting its bulk around the apartment for the two or three weeks it will realistically require. Today I turned to the ultimate antidote: a book about reading (Anne Fadiman, Alberto Manguel-style). I've been trying to decide how similar this activity is to, say, a football player watching old game tapes in the off-season, and have decided the player would have to be at least up off the couch occasionally, perhaps rehearsing a throw or two. But there might be beer and chips on hand as well. I like book books for compiling new lists of things to read, for getting my bearings in a particular region's literary output, or as a prompt to finally open a classic I've been sort of vaguely pretending to have a cursory knowledge of. There can, though, I think, be too much of this good thing, and generally by the time I've finished a book book I'm ready to get back into the deep end, take the training wheels off, what have you. I find the worst examples from this sub-genre can occasionally wind up feeling a bit precious, proclaiming a love for books over and over again without really sparking an interest on the part of the reader-once-removed for any of the books apparently loved.

Lawrence Clark Powell's Islands of Books is not one these worst, however. The fifteen essays in it cover Powell's extensive research on the work of D. H. Lawrence, as well as Melville, Whitman, Durrell, and his immersion in the California and Southwest literary landscape. Although I haven't read all of the books he discusses, what I really appreciate is the emphasis he puts on the places he was when he first read each book, and his descriptions of how each location continues to inform his later returns to the work. This is something I've always found fascinating, because your location can have very little to do with the reading material, but it gets so firmly lodged in memories of it that it becomes a second layer of setting. I remember in my last year of university taking a Shakespeare class that turned out to have a fairly ambitious syllabus. One of my housemates wasn't home all that often and I did a lot of the reading in the hammock he had strung up in his room. I'm actually a little surprised still that the hammock was able to support both me and that giant forest-green Norton anthology. Some of those plays--Julius Caesar, Coriolanus--for me will always be set as much in the courtyards and squares Shakespeare supplied as in the diamond pattern of the string at the foot end of Jason's hammock. Powell gets that and he, I think quite rightly, makes something more of it than a passing anecdote.

Islands of Books was one of my Benson, AZ, finds from last fall (I think you can actually see in the photo I've posted where my sweaty paw discoloured a bit of the uncoated cover stock. It was a hot one.) The book is a beauty design-wise. It's a 1991 reprint of the 1951 original, and was published by Dawson's Book Shop in Los Angeles. It was typeset by Ward Ritchie, who I've previously had trouble finding much information about online, but lo, my latest search has just turned up another book published by Dawson's, all about Ritchie's design and print work, available to order from the Oak Knoll website. I'll have to go tell my credit card the bad news. Really, how can I be expected to keep up with a prescribed reading list when stumbling down rabbit holes is so much more exciting?

Intra-curricular reading

After finishing up with The Count last week, I wolfed down a pair of books purchased at the same time (and that were looking pretty tempting by the time old Edmund had finished meting out the last of his many vile plots): Stet: An Editor's Life by Diana Athill and The King's English: Adventures of an Independent Bookseller by Betsy Burton. One is about a job I do and love, and the other about a job I think I'd like and hope to try sometime later in this lifetime.

Stet had been recommended by a fellow editor at a small publishing house and as soon as I started it I understood why he'd recommended it. It was uncanny how similar aspects of Athill's early working experience were to my own and probably to those of many other employees in the small publishing world. The first half is dedicated to her time with Andre Deutsch (British publishers of Jean Rhys, V. S. Naipaul, Mordecai Richler, Norman Mailer, and many famous others), the second half to her relationships with several of the authors she worked with over the years. Well worth reading if you've done any editing or if you've ever been curious about the process.

The King's English is a bookstore in Salt Lake City, Utah, established in the late seventies and still going fairly strong, I believe. Burton discusses the conversation that launched the shop, their first orders to publishers, and their more recent struggle to survive the big box and internet onslaught. The book also dovetails neatly with my Southwest fascination because of its location. The shop has hosted readings and signings by Terry Tempest Williams, Edward Abbey, Barry Lopez, Tony Hillerman, among others, and there is a great chapter devoted to the regional scene. Although I found Burton's voice a little punchy in places, on the whole the book was a heartening read for someone like me who will readily admit to possessing very little in the way of business sense but has always fantasized about owning a bookshop. (Then again, I suppose to someone less optimistic about the industry it might just as well read as a treatise on why such a venture should be avoided entirely.)

The Good Ship Publishing

I had a hunch when I saw the job title Publishing Assistant/Bosun on the Quill and Quire website today that the position advertised was probably at Coach House Books in Toronto, and I was right. Jobs at small publishers never quite fit the parameters of the traditional titles, but it's nice when the people advertising let you know that from the start.

Seeing that word bosun also reminded me of the first time I encountered it, which was just a few years ago (not enough seafaring literature in my childhood, obviously) in the manuscript for a chapbook I was working on with Dennis Lee. I queried it, thinking it might be a typo, and then after some other correspondence in which I audaciously/stupidly suggested his rhythm might be off at one point in another poem, he called and proceeded to recite, with gusto, that entire poem over the phone, and I had to conclude that in fact his rhythm was bang on. Even though it did nothing much to bolster my confidence in my editorial sensibilities, it will probably always be one of the highlights of my career.

From the Bookery

The trip to St. John's, NL, this past weekend was most excellent. It was drizzly the first day, but that was a welcome change in the midst of the heatwave persisting back in Halifax. My previous visit to Newfoundland was toward the end of a summer-long bike tour in 2001 and a much less relaxed affair. This time there were long walks, picnics, beer, meals out, and an afternoon at the provincial art gallery, The Rooms. On Friday afternoon I found a great little bookstore called The Bookery a few minutes' walk from downtown up Signal Hill Road. The selection was surprising for a store of its size, with better representation from small presses than I've seen in a long while. I made a few passes through before settling in the poetry section by the stairs. My eventual picks were Gander poet Stephen Rowe's debut collection Never More There, published by Nightwood Editions last year; more established Newfoundland poet Mary Dalton's fourth collection, Red Ledger, published a few years ago by Signal Editions; and Karen Solie's Pigeon, this year's Griffin Prize winner, published by Anansi. After that I tromped back down the hill for a pint of stout at the Yellow Belly microbrewery on Water Street. It was all too much really.

I will post more on all of these new purchases very soon. The Count-down is on. I have run out of enthusiastic musings on the 1095-page beast and now just have my eye on the finish line.

Expensive how?

When did we decide that books were expensive? Through this two-week heatwave, reading the old Count (see previous post) through the hottest hours of the day, this is a question I keep coming back to. It was sparked in part by the fifth installment in the Globe & Mail's The Future of Books series from last Saturday (also online here) on the future of booksellers. To someone who has always harboured the dream of someday opening a bookstore, the talk of books and bookstores dying really rankles. And Toronto bookseller Ben McNally, for one, thinks the future of the business will depend in some measure on bringing customers back around to the idea "that books are great value at regular price." Amen.

For between thirty and forty dollars, sometimes even fifteen or twenty, depending on the genre and the format, we get, what, six, ten, twenty hours of entertainment and education (often both) to be consumed entirely at our leisure. I don't find comparisons between art/entertainment forms to be especially useful, but it occurs to me that the question does lend itself to a very crude tally: the hours of engagement offered (six, ten, twenty hours with a book vs four hours at a concert, two at a movie, etc), a coefficient for the ability to do so privately (as opposed to say a concert or a visit to an art gallery or a movie theatre) in an age when privacy and control and independence are supposed to be among our chief concerns, another for the relative ease of taking this wonderful little invention with us wherever we go (portability: this is what gets us fired up about iPods and cell phones and lightweight camping equipment). And we want this for under ten dollars?

Rant over. I'm off to St. John's, Newfoundland, tomorrow and hope to do some good skulking around its bookish offerings. Recommendations welcome.

The Count of Monte Cristo: Report from the halfway point

Book club is underway now, and I've been charging through The Count of Monte Cristo (or The Big M.C., as my sister called it when we last compared notes) as fast as my little eyes can go. Two things: 1. This is a bloody long book, but 2. a much lighter and more engaging read than I was expecting. It's billed as an adventure after all, a story of revenge, and like many novels written at that time (about 1844) it first appeared in serialized form. So there are cliffhangers, and a certain predictability to all the hanging does develop (every new character will, however vague and unlikely seeming their initial proximity to the Count, eventually either run into him personally or be connected to him via his long con. revenge plot), but it's drawn me in. It's all very no holds barred and, well, vengeful. It's refreshing. Cathartic. This is why I studied Classics. Why open your heart and forgive when you can make them pay? Then there are all the peripheral perks: If the hero is going to be rich, why not make him endlessly so? And why settle for some pedestrian, street-level hideaway when you can have a grotto on an island? It's sort of as if Paul Auster or Haruki Murakami were to abandon the very last vestiges of reality and really go for it.

The cast is rather large, and I have had to do some flipping back and forth to remind myself whose stepfather initially did what to the Count. Which in turn has made me glad I didn't rip the first three hundred or so pages off the front of the book when they threatened to detach from their shoddy binding last week. However, if I do have to amputate, I see Wikipedia has a handy diagram connecting all the characters. It does give away a few plot turns, but a sampling of the connections themselves give you a sense of the high stakes involved: wants to marry, kills, sells, poisons, poisons (but doesn't kill), raises with sister-in-law, tries to assassinate, runs away in a scandalous lesbian relationship with. It's heavy. I should really get back.

Jim Rimmer makes the Chicago Manual of Style's June Q&A

I'll admit it. I get the Chicago Manual of Style's Q&A alerts straight to my inbox. Once a month. I snort at the questions that plagued me a few years ago, mull the ones that still have me stumped. Last month's list included a little reference to Jim Rimmer, a well-loved type designer, caster, letterpress printer, and owner of Pie Tree Press in New Westminster, BC, who passed away this past January. A couple of years ago I had the pleasure of working with Jim on a trade edition of his illustrated memoirs published by Gaspereau Press (and originally published as a limited edition at Pie Tree). Incidentally, it was while working on this project that I found out Jim had also designed the Whistler logo embroidered on the pink sweatshirt I wore for most of grade one. I wouldn't say it's what he'll necessarily be most remembered for, but it was a happy discovery for me.

Here's the question from the CMS Q&A:

Q. Hello, Chicago. You state that “an opening parenthesis should be preceded by a comma or a semicolon only in an enumeration” as in (1) a brown fox, (2) a silver fox. There are no other exceptions. You also say that the same rules apply to brackets. Another editor wants this: New Westminster, BC: Pie Tree Press, [1988]. It looks very wrong to me! I say the comma goes, because the bracketed matter is an interpolation, not part of the original text, and the comma has no function. Therefore the punctuation should be as if that interpolation doesn’t exist.

I would have cut that comma (although Chicago disagrees).

And if you want to know more about Jim Rimmer, there's a brief summary of his work and samples on the Heavenly Monkey site.

Mini round-up of bookstore deaths and books section goings-on

The list of independent bookstore deaths continues to grow. This past week, Quill and Quire reported the closure of This Ain't the Rosedale Library in Toronto (31 years old), and Book and Briar Patch in Regina (33). I was going to launch a rant on supporting what you say you love, but the fact is I'm guilty of it too. How about the diplomatic we? If we like the idea of these stores, we have to shop at them. They can't pay the rent with our fond thoughts.

Meanwhile, dedicated books sections in newspapers are themselves few and far between. Though it did away with its Saturday Books section about a year and a half ago (it's now combined with the Focus section), the Globe and Mail is currently running a series on the future of the book. The first was (sigh, of course) on e-readers, the second on cover design, and this week's will discuss rare and antiquarian books in the mighty digital age. They've not been especially in-depth so far, but relevant overviews of each situation anyway.

A few posts back I pondered a poetry subscription club, and look, The Rumpus has it all in hand! I'll be surprised if any Canadian titles make their list, but I'm pleased to see they've recognized the genre as worthy of its own gig. I also recommend The Rumpus site generally. Their Books section has some good stuff in terms of reviews and interviews. They pack a lot into each week and do a special feature on Sundays.

P. K. Page for tea

When I was about eleven my gran took me with her to hear P. K. Page reading from Brazilian Journal, her memoir of the time she and her husband, a Canadian diplomat, spent in Brazil during his posting there. The reading was in a one-room art gallery in West Vancouver, a few minutes' drive from my gran's house, and almost every time I've seen her since then my gran has mentioned how much she wanted to have Page over for tea after the reading, and how she'll always wish she'd just gone ahead and invited her.

A couple of years ago I finally read Brazilian Journal myself. A lot of it concerns setting up and keeping house in a humid climate and the many social engagements required of a diplomat and his wife, but I think the most interesting passages are Page's reports on her development as a visual artist. The book includes several of her sketches and paintings, and it's quite fascinating to read about her efforts (failed and successful) at capturing various subjects -- plants, animals, rooms, different kinds of daylight.

When she died this past January I realized that with the exception of a few samples from anthologies, I hadn't really read much of her poetry, so I picked up a copy of The Essential P. K. Page, a selection edited by Arlene Lampert and Théa Gray and published by Porcupine's Quill in 2008. The poems included are all very tightly wound and lyrical, and Page seems to have a precise sense of how far to push a series of internal rhymes and associative sounds before it leaves the realm of natural speech and becomes a game played only for its own sake. I have to admit I didn't enjoy all of it. There are pieces I found almost too refined, without an angle into the thought process at work or the tension of getting it down in these lines. But the ones that did strike me will, I think, stay with me for a long time. "A Backwards Journey" describes the childhood experience of finding infinity on a box of Dutch Cleanser that pictures a woman holding a can of Dutch Cleanser and on that can another woman holding another can, and so on. (For me it was the kid in shorts on the Borax box.) Here are the final few lines:

I think I knew that if no one called
and nothing broke the delicate jet
of my attention, that tiny image
could smash the atom of space and time.

(I wish we'd invited her back for tea.)

An Almost Canadian Southwest Writer

(Note the rumpled-bedsheet background. We've had company on our couch the past few days, hence the lack of bloggage.)

Took a trip down to J. W. Doull used bookstore last weekend and although I didn't find any of the summer book club picks, the initial reason for my visit, I did leave with a few other good finds: Wallace Stegner's essay collection Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West; Lawrence Thornton's novel Imagining Argentina, set during the years of the "disappeareds" in the 1970s and 80s; and A Piece of My Heart, some earlier Richard Ford I've had on my list for a while.

While waiting for my book club parcel from Powell's to arrive (I'm feeling awfully conscious of having introduced book club here and not yet begun the reading -- a common book club ailment, I've heard) I got started on the Stegner. It's a combination of natural history, desert politics (water usage, dams, parks), and a scan of the region's literature. I'm starting to feel pretty at home in these cruises through lists of Southwest authors. There's something pretty satisfying in getting your footing in a new territory, particularly when the reading is entirely extra-curricular.

Although I came to Stegner's work via the Southwest route, in reading this collection I've discovered (belatedly) that his family lived in Eastend, Saskatchewan, near the Cypress Hills, for about five years between 1914 and 1920. If they'd had another good year or two farming he might have stayed for good. He's written about the Cypress Hills area in his book Wolf Willow, and I just (just this minute) discovered that a group of writers actually purchased the house his father built and operate it as an artist retreat, much like Elizabeth Bishop House in Great Village, NS. Huh.

Letterpress finale (for now)

So here's my card project, complete.



And a close-up. The placement of the ship in relation to the text could use some finessing, but I was hogging precious press time and didn't want to anger my classmates. Overall I'm pretty happy with the old girl. One of the first recipients will be Nikhil, the very new baby of the friend who introduced me to this saying in the first place. I'm quite sure I'll like the cut of Nikhil's jib.

On sharing

A couple of weeks ago a musician friend and I were talking about the wonders of blogging, questions of frequency, where lines ought to be drawn, et cetera, and he asked me whether I intended to post any of my poems here. I might. Occasionally. This one has been rejected by a couple of journals, but I'm bullheaded enough to like it anyway. It may find its way into print someday, but for now I'll give it a home here.

Near Muniac, New Brunswick

Outside town, still clasped
in the stale, steady pulse
of a full afternoon, we moved
down the road away
from the festival grounds,
drinks still in hand, the damp/
parched taste of new-mown grass
in the nose, ambling wide between
the dip of the ditch and the yellow line,
hoping for a glimpse of the St. John.

It was in one of those minutes,
blinking schools of fireflies on either side,
a couple of the guys lagging back for a pee,
Nina weaving in her path, eyes on the sky,
trying to put Orion and the Dipper together,
someone else murmuring about
the Big and the Little,
when I scissored again
into the trough of nostalgia
that rests like warm fog along
country roads on summer midnights,

when people lost to themselves
some years, find each other again,
in the dark and stumbling, but for
a little while, on a night, down a road,
down a night, on a road, like this.

Your jib

A letterpress classmate took a bunch of photos at this week's session and kindly gave me permission to post one he took of my card project in progress. You can check his Flickr page for more.

The cut of the jib in question is still to come. Our instructor informed me I was the second person in the history of his teaching career here to pair that saying with a cut of a sailboat. Well, you know what they say. Great minds take adult ed. classes.

Frye Festival, Richard Ford

It's Tuesday and I always seem to be a little wired when I get home from my letterpress class. Last night was much more sedate, but I did find an excellent interview on Youtube -- Globe and Mail Books editor Martin Levin interviewing fiction writer Richard Ford at the Frye Festival in Moncton, NB, in 2008 -- so while I'm feeling owlish I'll give you the link. This is to part one of seven, each about ten minutes long. If you have the time, it's worth it. I was in the midst of roaring through Ford's Frank Bascombe trilogy (The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land) at the time of the festival, and found out a few weeks later. Was I mad when I found out he'd been within about three hours of my house? Um. Yes. I was mad through the first two or three segments of the video over two years later. How much does it cost to hire someone to just keep you from doing (or not doing) things like this?

Clubbing

The titles are all in for the family summer book club. There are two 1,000+ pagers on there, so that should be interesting. I toyed with suggesting Don Quixote. The new-ish Edith Grossman translation has been on the shelf for a few years, but I foolishly thought it would be rejected in favour of shorter reads. Now who feels like the lightweight? I went with The Anthologist, which I’m still keen to read, especially having read a couple of great reviews. Here’s the list, arranged in descending order by weight:

The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
In Dubious Battle, John Steinbeck
Goodbye to Berlin, Christopher Isherwood
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
The Anthologist, Nicholson Baker

Shortly after I bullied my way into book club I discovered The Rumpus.net and their summer book club. Clearly I won’t have time, but I like the idea, mainly because I like it when things come in the mail. They almost seem free by the time they arrive, and it’s always a little miraculous that they do arrive.

A couple of years ago I read Al Silverman’s The Time of Their Lives, about the three-martini-lunch days of publishing in the United States. It was a good overview, but an entire book could be (and in some cases has been) written about almost all of the publishers included, and I don’t know that I retained much of the whirlwind tour, in spite of the author’s enthusiastic telling. Silverman was CEO of the Book of the Month Club for several years, so it also overlaps with the club's own heyday. I believe Book of the Month still exists in some form, but I don't think it's the institution it used to be.

I’ve sometimes wondered if a poetry-specific subscription program could fly. I have a handful of publishers (Coach House, Vehicule, Gaspereau, Porcupine’s Quill, Counterpoint, Graywolf, Faber) whose poetry lists I keep an eye on, but only a small fraction of their titles ever make it to my shelf, mainly because in between (often) not finding them at my local seller and trying very hard to give my business to independent bookshops which are becoming increasingly fewer and further between and not keeping a list in my pocket and not actively acquiring the sorts of gadgetry that would allow me to be reminded, say, hourly of the books I want and my ranging proximity to a store that might have them in stock…I simply forget to buy them. What if a third party made a selection of twelve titles a year and offered the package at a small discount (small—I'm forgetful, not cheap)? This requires more thought. Or maybe just the swift and unambiguous kibosh from someone with business sense!

Writing Responsibly

A couple of articles I’ve read recently have got me thinking about a tough issue in poetry, and I suppose in all forms of art. It’s the question of how to address the real, wide world and all its shortcomings in a way that does justice to the ugliness and to the art form itself. As an editor I’ve seen a lot of rants arranged on the page as poetry and novels that are thinly disguised vehicles for educating on a historical event or marginalized group of people. But the vacuous opposite is just as bad, right? The tight, witty object poem that ultimately leaves you cold. The virtually asexual love song. The ones getting it right, I think, are pretty brave. They’ve learned something about how many boxes and bird cages and babies and goats they can pile onto the bicycle and still keep pedalling across the tightrope. They could run across by themselves, but then it’s just about them. James McMurtry has it down. He can pack Walmart, Iraq, George Bush, and small-town Texas into a song and it doesn’t feel clumsy.

In last month’s issue of Poetry, in an essay called “This Land is Our Land,” David Biespiel wrote about the shrinking interest in poetry in America and the reluctance of American poets to write about the issues currently facing Americans. He thinks there might be a connection. I’m inclined to agree, though it’s not entirely clear-cut. You can read the essay here, and check out the range of responses in the comments section.

On our side of the border, operating out of Okanagan College in Kelowna, BC, there’s a new journal in town. It’s called Ryga, after novelist and playwright George Ryga, who also has a more established award for social awareness in literature named after him. They’ve got two issues out, and another in the works. In his inaugural editorial Sean Johnston talks about the journal’s mission:

George Ryga wrote about this world now and that currency, that urgency is what we want to carry on here. Ryga will seek the best stories, essays, poems and plays in this tradition – the literature that our country is so rich in: literature that writes its way home without giving in to nostalgia; literature that celebrates all our competing traditions and resists any safe homogeneity; but literature that refuses to romanticize the voices of the past in a way that denies them a life in the present or the right to presume a central role in the future.

In “Ryga Redux,” the introduction to the second issue, Johnston rearticulates from the vantage point of having reviewed some submissions to a journal with this particular stated mission:

Since we first started putting together the material for Ryga, many people have submitted. The difference in submissions is shown most tellingly, I think, in the authors' notion of the political in art. This is where we differ -- art does not succeed very often when it shouts. It rarely succeeds when its primary audience is in the room, at the artist's feet. The scale of our world doesn't always allow us to work beside those who are suffering because of our material wealth, but they still suffer. We still feast. The true artist's imagination must keep those who suffer in the room with him.

It was hard to pick just one paragraph from each essay to include here. You can find both by following the links on the journal’s website.

In my own work I think I started out with a great willingness to expound on world as I saw it, and then as I got a little further along in figuring out how I say what I say, started to focus that mainly on things that were inarguably my own. I’ve felt inspired in the last couple of years to risk being a little clumsy again in order to say things worth saying. Some poems of mine will be appearing in an upcoming issue of Ryga, and I was thrilled when I got that news. But when I reread them now I think about the different ways I could have fit more onto the bike.

Tongue twisters and wooden type

The results of this week's letterpress class. This is just a proof, to see how our type sits. Next week we'll be able to do an edition of twenty or so in our preferred colours, likely black with a second pass in red for a couple of punctuation marks. I think we may want to add some space to separate the three parts of the bottom text. And that T in Tongue is a bit of a beater, but I guess T's do get a lot of use. The definite article being so popular and all.

Heather Reisman

I have absolutely no idea how I missed this last week, but here it is now:

Start here: Mount Allison profs protest Reisman degree (CBC)

then check this: Open letter to the university from part-time instructor Amanda Jernigan (Book Ninja)

The Antigonish Review

The spring issue of The Antigonish Review is out now, and includes a poem of mine. The cover photo is by Mount Allison professor and Anchorage Press founder Thaddeus Holownia.

In other news, my family's summer book club has decided to reconvene after a hiatus last summer when there seemed to be some uncertainty about whether everyone had had a good time the year before. Although I won't be home I have been granted a selection. I've been considering Nicholson Baker's latest novel, The Anthologist, which is about the plight of an occasionally published poet trying to write the introduction to a poetry anthology. Why would that interest me? No idea.

The theme of this year's club is "books you've been meaning to read," though, and the Baker book just came out last year, so perhaps I haven't been meaning for long enough yet. I have always meant to read Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm. The film adaptation is one of my faves, but it's quite possible someone else at home has already read it, which ruins the fun a bit. I'll keep thinking, but not just yet. It's the May long weekend, it's up around 20 degrees. Gin, tonic, where are you?

Raymond Chandler, local haunts

Over the past few months at my newish day job I've been editing a mystery novel. This particular manuscript isn't a strict member of the genre, but it spurred my interest. With the exception of a few John Le Carrés in recent years and a couple of Mrs. Pollifax mysteries when I was nine or ten (which I know, I know, are also both departures from the main), it remains an unread corner of the library I suspect might be a real gold mine. The Pollifaxes were actually located in the large-print section of our library, which I originally mistook as being the obvious segue from Y.A. to adult fiction.

Last weekend I spent a happy hour or so perusing in a secondhand bookstore I'd been meaning to visit in my neighbourhood. A little jazz was playing on the stereo inside the store, and there was a pair of older gentlemen in armchairs in the middle of the store discussing bicycles. Can I reserve my spot now? The back corner was dedicated to detective/mystery/crime/espionage and I found a recent edition of the first of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe novels, The Big Sleep. I was going to attempt a definition of Chandler's place in the world of detective literature, but coming from me it would only be a paraphrasing of various Wikipedia entries, so I'll leave you to consult amongst yourselves. He just about had me at hello, though. Here's a sample from page 1:

The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn't have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn't seem to be really trying.

I was cackling and the older gentlemen were now staring at me, so I decided to shove off. They approved of my purchase and pointed out that there were lots of lady mystery writers too. I look forward to it.

I want to get back to this business of genres sometime, though. I take real issue with the whole notion. If we can label a well-crafted piece of fiction that happens to centre on, say, a murder/disappearance/heist (aliens/androids/mermen), then can we please also declare the angst-ridden Canadian family saga its own genre rather than simply calling it Literary? Certainly there is less ambitious work being written to a bungled understanding of the example set by the best in this vein. I feel an unwieldy rant coming on that I want to save for another time. Besides, I have to price an order of What Would Marlowe Do? bracelets. Takers?

Night School

After years of talk and no action, this week I finally jumped into letterpress printing, at an evening class offered at the Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, here in Halifax. I'd been surrounded by the necessary equipment & expertise at my old job, but had never actually gone so far as to line up ink and page on my own. Trying new things isn't really my gig, but occasionally I want something badly enough to push through the awkward, woodsy stage that has to come first.

Luckily I am in very good company in this particular class. Lots of poetic talk about the importance of printed material and the dissemination of ideas, but visible trepidation in the presence of a machine that will actually allow us to participate in the making of said material. "This pedal? And do I keep my foot on it? Oh. Okay, so no. This handle? Now?" These are my people.

Above is the result of the first evening. The image itself is of course not mine but one of the gems housed in the college basement, along with many drawers of type (wooden and metal) and various cuts, lots of them nautically themed, this being a nautical sort of province. These teeth came from a drawer labelled "Health." My project partner and I now have to decide if we want to incorporate this into our poster assignment or if we'll strike out on a new path. I'm inclined to stick with the teeth, myself, if we can find a bit of text (a toothy quote or short poem) to accompany it. Ideas?

Singing Wind Bookshop, Benson, AZ

This past November my partner kindly donated some of his hard-won aeroplan points to me so that I could travel with him to a conference he was attending in Phoenix and celebrate my thirtieth birthday in the desert. Mostly I celebrated in airports and on airplanes, but by sunset I was parked on the patio of our hotel room, shoes off, beer in hand, and a couple of monster cacti within reach.

On the last day of our trip, we drove an hour or so east of Tucson to the town of Benson, and then down a long dirt road, over a cattle guard, and past a fierce Dalmatian to visit Singing Wind Bookshop, "Headquarters for Books about the Southwest." The shop had been recommended by a family friend, and I doubt we would have found it otherwise.

I have several favourite bookstores, some dead, some still living: J. W. Doull here in Halifax, Duthies in Vancouver, Pages in Toronto, Elliott Bay Books in Seattle, and the monument that is Powell's in Portland, Oregon. Singing Wind is of a different ilk, but may be my new number one. And it might well be the only bookstore situated in the middle of a cattle ranch. Its owner, Winifred Bundy, welcomed us with a tour of the store that I wish I could quote more of here. I do remember that it included mention of short and tall Californians--referring to the height of the books, not the authors (cue pause for acknowledgement of the joke--we were happy to provide).

Bundy doesn't have an online store, and she only accepts cash or cheque. We were the only customers in the store, but there was a sense that things were thriving. We were invited to a fiesta in celebration of a local author, taking place the following afternoon (refreshments and valet parking provided). There are a handful of times in my life when I've seriously considered skipping a return flight, and this is one of them. I wanted to buy the closest property for sale and spend the next ten years reading whatever Bundy told me to. Or working my way through the store shelves, which I think would amount to more or less the same thing.

What did we buy? I'll preface this short list by reminding you of the cash-only situation. Many a volume was carted around the store and then reluctantly returned to its shelf. However: Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey, Islands of Books by Lawrence Clark Powell (for a good, though now slightly dated, introduction to Southwest literature, check out his Books: South Southwest) and a trio of lectures given by Powell, recorded by members of the band Calexico, and released by Singing Wind itself. Dear reader, three words: Benson. Go. Now.

Grounded, by Seth Stevenson

Without really meaning to, I've wound up reading a lot of travel literature in the last few years. It's good fuel for travel plans, and makes long winters seem less so. With the right book, I'm not slogging through another February, but just putting my feet up at the Royal Geographical Society headquarters while the funding for my next expedition comes through. Paul Theroux is one of my favourites. His The Old Patagonian Express was the book that spurred my interest in South America, and I've since read most of his other books. Mainly I find his crankiness refreshing.

Last week I was given a copy of Seth Stevenson's new (and first) book, Grounded: A Down to Earth Journey Around the World. It muscled its way to the front of the queue and I wolfed it down in a couple of evenings, finishing it off Friday morning before heading to work. If you've read it to the end, you'll know it pained me to go to work after all that.

As the title suggests, Stevenson's goal was to circumnavigate the Earth without taking to the skies, a goal I heartily support. He and his girlfriend leave their jobs and their apartment in Washington, DC, take Amtrak to Philadelphia, and from there a commuter train to a deserted station near a port on the Delaware River, where they board a container ship to Antwerp. The book recounts the travel itself, the logistical acrobatics sometimes involved, and provides some interesting background on their chosen modes of transport--the invention of the shipping container, the history of the bullet train in Japan, and the failure of high-speed rail in North America.

I made a pledge about ten years ago to stay grounded, and although I have done quite a bit of long-distance train travel, I've also broken my pledge for several quick Christmas trips home, and some further afield. Perhaps it's time to re-commit. Stevenson's account is both an inspiration and a deterrent to try. He reminded me about the sort of zen that sets in on a long train trip with the right surrounding passengers, the deadening frustration in the company of the other sort, and that appearances can be completely deceiving when it comes to determining which category any passenger will fall into. The high-school dropouts with the ten-month-old baby: excellent distraction through North Dakota. Affable-looking backpacker: annoying braggart who talked the whole way from Chicago to Boston. That said, I remember the leering drunk I once had to sit next to on an overnight flight from Vancouver to Montreal as being significantly more horrific, despite the experience having occupied only four hours versus full days. I think maybe we approach slower modes of transportation in a more forgiving mindset. The presence of actual scenery also factors in.

Although I initially found Stevenson's tone a little too chatty for my tastes, I settled into it within a chapter or two. He is less the sage, jaded surveyor of humanity and more the funny friend over beer, and his journey seems remarkably accessible as a result. In the end my only real complaint was that he had condensed six months of boat, bike, train, and car into just 272 pages.