Blog Posts - Outside of a dog

M: Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851)

31/12/2018

Call me Ishmael. One of the most famous first sentences in English-language literature. And yet, while most people know that Moby Dick is the name of a white whale and that he was pursued by one-legged Captain Ahab, how many have the courage to sit down with all 641 small-font pages and follow the ship Pequod round the globe?

I confess I didn’t. I needed the help of William Hootkins’ incredible audio recording (Naxos, 2005) to get me through it. It’s close to 25 hours long and it feels like I spent two or three months slowly listening to the dense prose, dipping into the Penguin Drop Caps edition when I had to return the audiobook to the library and wait for it to be available again.

I don’t think this book could be published today. We don’t have time for long sentences or exhaustive treatments of a subject. We deal in slogans and sound bytes. Who sits by the fire with family and reads aloud from a book when there are lifetimes of YouTube videos to watch?

So why does Moby Dick endure?

Four books on parenting teens: to nag or not to nag?

31/12/2018

What to do when your son is allergic to schoolwork? When the 5-7 pm “witching hour” of toddlerhood has turned into an equally combative “homework hour”? When you’re tired, so tired, of nagging to get anything done? All you want for Christmas is for him to do what he needs to do without reminders for one day.

I thought I had found the answer when I saw a podcast from the Art of Manliness about a book called He’s Not Lazy by Adam Price. Instead, after listening to the podcast and reading the book for myself, I wanted even more answers. This led me to read three more books on parenting teens, all in the quest to answer the question,

“Should I enforce homework completion or let my son fail to do his homework and learn from it?”

The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling (2012)

14/10/2018

As a Harry Potter fan (is there really anyone who isn’t?), I thought about reading J.K. Rowling’s book for adults, The Casual Vacancy, for a long time before finally plunging in. Small-town politics didn’t strike me as the most fascinating of subjects compared to wizards, magic wands and an epic struggle between good and evil. But a good writer is a good writer and once I started, I couldn’t put The Casual Vacancy down.

The quote from Time on the front cover pretty much sums it up: “A deeply moving book… big, ambitious, brilliant, profane, funny, very upsetting, and magnificently eloquent.” And this novel taught me a lot about writing more vividly.

Catherine Certitude by Patrick Modiano/jean-Jacques sempé (1988)

17/9/2018

www.amazon.ca

While browsing through the Toronto Public Library’s Award-Winners page, the name of the Nobel Prize in Literature winner for 2014 jumped out at me: Patrick Modiano. I looked at the titles of his available at the TPL and a cheerfully illustrated front cover caught my eye, that of Catherine Certitude. When I clicked on the link to the book’s page, I saw that it was illustrated by Jean-Jacques Sempé, whose humorous illustrations made Le petit Nicolas (René Goscinny) immortal. I immediately clicked “Place hold.”

Sometimes I don’t have the courage to dive headfirst into a great author’s oeuvre, so for me, this little volume of only 95 pages, with lots of pictures, seemed just right for my September teacher-brain. Besides, this book is one part of the reason Modiano won the Nobel Prize, and as I read it, I began to understand why.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (1813)

13/9/2018

www.penguinshop.ca

For this post, I’m assuming you’ve read Pride and Prejudice and don’t need to be persuaded of its merits. More intelligent and eloquent people have written books and doctoral theses have been written on this novel so there’s nothing really new to say. Instead, I’m going to give you an A-Z of things beginner writers like me can learn from Pride and Prejudice.

The Red Tent by Anita Diamant (1997)

14/8/2018

Credit: Amazon.ca

If you want to write a certain genre, you’ve got to read all you can in that genre, at least 100 titles, says Heather Sellers in Chapter by Chapter. So, I googled lists of best historical fiction and The Red Tent by Anita Diamant was on most of them.

It’s the story of Dinah, Jacob’s daughter by Leah, given only a chapter in Genesis 34. It’s a confusing account, since Shechem, son of Hamor, apparently rapes Dinah (no consent given?) but then takes her into his home, wanting to marry her. He is so desperate for her hand in marriage he agrees to Simeon and Levi’s deceitful condition that he and all the men of the city be circumcised. While Shechem and his men are recovering from the procedure, Simeon and Levi descend upon the town and slaughter every male and take the women, children, livestock and everything else for themselves. When confronted by their father Jacob about the trouble this has brought upon him, they justify their violence by saying “Should he have treated our sister like a prostitute?”

And that’s all we know about Dinah. So how did Anita Diamant write 352 pages in her voice?

Q: The Greek Coffin Mystery by Ellery Queen (1932)

23/7/2018

Credit: Penguinrandomhouse.ca

I would have liked to have been a fly on the wall at the meeting at Penguin when they discussed which author should be chosen for the letter Q. They weren’t plagued by what the French call l’embarras du choix, that’s for sure. On the Penguin Random House website, most of the authors whose last name begins with Q write non-fiction which also narrows the field.

So the editors of the series chose Ellery Queen, a name unfamiliar to me, though afterward I wondered how I had missed it. It’s the joint pen name of two cousins, Frederick Dannay (pseudonym of Daniel Nathan) and Manfred B. Lee (pseudonym of Emanuel Lepofsky), and also the name of their detective protagonist, which lends him an air of authenticity. The cousins were prolific writers of crime novels, and expanded the Ellery Queen brand to radio plays, a magazine, films and even board games & jigsaw puzzles.

R: Haroun and the Sea of STories by Salman Rushdie

17/7/2018

Credit: www.penguinrandomhousecom

When I was given the “R” title in the Penguin Drop Caps series I really had no idea what to expect. I was delighted by the rich azure cover, the cobalt page edges and the swirly gold cover initial embellished with an Indian motif, but all I knew about Salman Rushdie was based on an ad campaign in the Toronto subway system promoting some new book of his and the news that Muslim clerics had issued a fatwa against him. Because of the subway ads I assumed he was a Canadian writer. And because of the scary-sounding fatwa against his book The Satanic Verses I assumed he was promoting some kind of paganism that was offensive to Muslims.

Wrong and wrong again.

La vie devant soi (The Life Before Us) by Romain Gary as Émile Ajar, 1975.

1/7/2018

Would you read a book about the right to die by someone who committed suicide five years afterward? A colleague handed me this book as he was cleaning off his desk for the summer and said I’d enjoy it. Since I had loved his recommendation of Le gone du Chaâba by Azouz Begag, I decided to push past my initial distaste of the front cover (two naked figures—a child sitting on a woman’s lap—with stones for heads and black dots for navels) and my confusion about the back page description: “The story of a little Arab boy’s love for an old Jewish woman”. Love, like romantic love, I wondered?

But not three pages in, I was hooked. The characters, the setting, the first-person narration, the symbolism and the surprising ending make it obvious why this novel won the Prix Goncourt in 1975 for “the best and most imaginative prose work of the year”.

The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells (1996)

26/6/2018

What a title. It scared me a little at first because I thought it would be about some kind of witches’ coven. Instead, behind one of the catchiest titles I’ve ever heard, is a story about mothers and daughters and about friendship and love.

The story wastes no time in getting to the inciting incident. Right on the third page we learn that Siddalee Walker, a theatre director, has spilled her soul to a New York Times reporter who writes that Vivi Abbott Walker, her mother, was a tap-dancing child abuser. Ouch. Vivi is so hurt she refuses to speak to Sidda for months. But the fact that one time Vivi did beat all her children, with her eldest daughter Sidda taking the brunt of the belt buckle, will not go away. Sidda has spent her whole life trying to make sense of this event and of her mother’s subsequent lengthy absence. However, thanks to the intervention of her three best friends, who with her compose the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Vivi agrees to send her daughter a scrapbook she calls her Divine Secrets, and which Siddalee has asked for to help her prepare for directing a play about women and friendship.

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