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.