Summer reading

Given my poor showing with Ulysses, R.M Vaughan’s column in yesterday’s Globe made me smile. Tried to link to it, but it’s behind the pay wall. I’ve pinched and posted parts of the article to support the much maligned “summer read.”  

I blame Jian Ghomeshi. The floppy-haired CBC Radio One host has been bragging all summer that he is reading James Joyce’s Ulysses, another impossible book. He’s way past page 17, I’m sure — but then, he has production assistants. 

…

Faced with one of my failings, I make like the Conservative Party and take comfort in fake populism. I’m just an ordinary fellow, I tell myself, a common sort. Why should I be held to such impossibly high literary standards? Only eggheads, Brits, sexual deviants (same thing) and desperate-for-ideas movie producers read 19th-century literature. What are the reg’lar folks reading?

Regular folks, according to paperback bestseller lists across this continent (okay, the English-speaking parts) are inhaling Michael Connelly’s latest legal thriller The Lincoln Lawyer — the title of which, you’ll be relieved to know, refers not to Abraham Lincoln or any other remotely educational topic, but to a large automobile. See, you’re already over the biggest hurdle.

Once you crack this book open, you’re safely on autopilot for a good 500 pages. What bliss, to glide like a bit of dandelion fluff from one neatly mowed, monochromatic lawn of text to the next. You could literally read this book drunk on a noisy bus and still not miss a plot point. Connelly is a no-frills writer from the Ellery Queen school of mystery fiction: Unveil the dastardly crime no later than page 5, set up the main characters before page 25, proceed with the nifty procedurals.

… 

The publishing industry, a world as rarefied (and, increasingly, about as relevant) as Dead Sea Scroll scholarship, likes to refer to books like The Lincoln Lawyer — fast paced, well-crafted books that engage millions — as summer books, or, more dismissively, beach books, as if people are any smarter in the winter or indoors. … 

I wish Ghomeshi the luck of the Irish in his attempt to skip across the bogs of Ulysses.

But by the time he’s finished, I’ll have read The Lincoln Lawyer, two science-fiction novels, and a grocery checkout book (another misunderstood literary subset) about plastic-surgery disasters — all without consulting a dictionary, flipping back to some enigmatic foreshadowing in the beginning chapters, or reverently placing said books gently on my lap whilst savouring the author’s dulcet flow.

R.M. Vaughan is a Toronto artist, novelist, poet and playwright.

Amy

Future of books

This might be a bit old, but I’m slow and just caught it on Blogspotting. Interesting piece that references a May 2006 article from the New York Times about digital publishing, intellectual property and the concept of authors as “performers.”

Amy

Taking a knee ten pages in …

Oh my. Such incredible excitement when I first cracked Ulysses. Such horrible panic when after only ten pages I was back on-line looking for reading notes and a bit of context. I did find this, which was helpful:

“Although Joyce only began writing Ulysses in 1914, he had been laying the plans for it since 1906. His intention was to create a fictional Everyman– Leopold Bloom– to rival the classical figure of Homer’s Odysseus (aka Ulysses), which Joyce admired as the most well-rounded portrait of a human in literature. But he took the tribute a step further by making Bloom’s adventures parallel Ulysses’s, on a much smaller scale.

The action takes place in 18 chapters spaced approximately one hour apart, starting at 8:00am on Thursday 16 June 1904, and ending in the early hours of June 17.

The central parallel to Homer is that Bloom’s wife Molly– like Penelope in Homer– is being courted by a suitor, the dashing Blazes Boylan. In order to win her back, Bloom must negotiate twelve trials– his Odyssey.”

Alright, that’s helpful. I read The Odyssey in college and thoroughly enjoyed it. More importantly, I understood the Odyssey … Right now, I don’t have the same confidence in Ulysses.  

I felt slightly better after listening to Sounds like Canada this morning as Jian’s only 100 pages into the book and he started the Ulysses challenge ages (days?) ago. Unfortunately, I tuned out much of the discussion and returned to it just as the listener-reviewer was suggesting that any movie version of Ulysses should be structured like TV’s 24. Given that I now know the story takes place over the course of one day, I’d buy that if I wasn’t so completely off the show … 

As a side, there’s been a bit of a debate in The Globe and Mail about Joyce’s work since Saturday’s article about how his “grandson has intimidated legions of scholars in copyright skirmishes.” Letters to the editor over the last couple of days have been less about the article and more a continuation of the debate over whether anyone has actually read Joyce.

Happy Canada Day!

It is a beautiful sunny day in Toronto and, like all good Saturday’s, it should have started with a leisurely read of The Globe and Mail. It didn’t. I barely made it past the horrible Breguet ad, which points out that “today, the American people and Breguet celebrate 230 years of an enlightened view of mankind…” (humm … Not sure how the watch maker contributed to enlightened thought and it’s an odd claim given that it’s made on Canada Day and appears in a Canadian paper. Maybe the ad buyer thought he had scored a full page in the Boston Globe … )

Anyway, by 11 a.m. LeRoy from Roto-Rooter had graciously accepted $250 to clear a blocked drain in the basement and I’m only now starting to work my way through Paul Waldie’s article about Warren Buffett’s $31-billion donation to the Bill and Melinda Gates’ foundation [can’t link to the piece as it's behind the firewall…] and Derek DeCloet’s “A tale of two billionaires.”

There’s a great line from Buffet: “I think rich people should leave their children enough so they can do anything. But not enough so they can do nothing.” Not exactly something my folks need to worry about, and given that the largest foundation in Canada has $1.3 billion in total assets, I imagine my local billionaire’s club has far fewer members debating how much to leave to the kids and if they should combine their fortunes for maximum impact or design new letterhead for their own private giving.

If it’s a topic that interests you, there was a good article last week in the Toronto Star by David Olive (“Generous, but not to a fault“) about Canadian philanthropists and how we differ from the US.

Amy