The time: early morning in mid-December. The sky and harbour, the leaves on the trees, the pavements and streets, have been scoured by last night’s thunderstorm, which turned the harbour lead-grey under a purple sky, drove the motorboats to safety, and the sailboats racing under their jibs before the east wind. Marj is waked by the brightness in her room, she sees strips of sunshine dancing on the wall, and hears the sound of Kate’s steady breathing across the hall. She and Kate separated coolly last night without even embracing.
Until I cracked open Terry Glavin’s Dead Reckoning: Confronting the Crisis in Pacific Fisheries (Greystone), I thought fish had no more significance to me than the wasabe and the soy sauce on the side. Now I know different.
The inviting cover and unique layout of Sunnybrook: A True Story with Lies by Persimmon Blackbridge drew me in and kept me there. The story starts when Diane gets a job at the Sunnybrook Institution for the Mentally Handicapped by saying she had worked at a child guidance clinic.
Rob Kovitz’s Room Behavior (Treyf /Insomniac) is an interesting attempt by a Manitoba architect to document the impact that a room has on its inhabitants. Kovitz juxtaposes text and image, inviting us to look at the rooms we live in, the spaces we occupy, in a new light.
Pamela Donoghue’s first collection of stories, Comfort Zones (Polestar First Fiction) consists of seventeen stories, most of which revolve around a Cape Breton family. Donoghue’s characters don’t reach great personal epiphanies and they move through life analyzing their surroundings and those around them, while unaware of themselves.
It’s easy to forget that Canada (a place in which the word “culture” is usu?ally preceded by “arts and,” or “cuts to”) has an entertainment industry too, which is why I wanted to read Mondo Canuck: A Canadian Pop Culture Odyssey, by Geoff Pevere and Greig Dymond (Prentice Hall). Mondo Canuck isn’t exactly a heroic journey, rather a pleasant stroll through the best (and worst) of Canadian pop culture extending from Peter Gzowski, Stompin’ Tom Connors, the Mounties and Bruno Gerussi to Anne of Green Gables, Anne Murray, Mr. Dress-up, Marshall McLuhan, and the McKenzie brothers.
Last fall, I went to hear Renee Rodin read from her first published collection of poetry and prose, Bread and Salt (Talonbooks). The group was intimate that night, as if they were an extended family.
In Ronald Wright’s A Scientific Romance (Knopf), an archaeologist suffering from a terminal illness discovers H. G. Wells’s time machine when it arrives sans pilot in a London warehouse in the year 1999.
I get nervous when I can’t remember what happened to me when I was younger. My parents and my grandparents never seem at a loss when telling their past, and I wonder if I have defective neurons that prevent me from storing information properly. Josef Skvorecky seems to remember his young life quite well and the memoir section of his latest book, Headed For the Blues: A Memoir With Ten Stories (Knopf), reads like it would be told: a long, woven, halting tale.
