Pickwick Papers to Paul's Poems

While my life bumps along through a rough patch on a couple of fronts, I've been rediscovering the world of books and the solace of meeting fresh perspectives through them. Took a stack of books out of the library, returned half no more than glanced at, but got through all of Royal Murders (sadly, returned, so I don't have the author's name on hand and renewed The Last Apocalypse: Europe at the Year 1000 A.D. / by James Reston, Jr. and By the Sword: a History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers, and Olympic Champions / by Richard Cohen.

I would also like to recommend, from the PG Public Library, The Tale of One Bad Rat
/ by Bryan Talbot, published by Dark Horse Books. This one is a graphic novel, dealing with a rat-loving girl called Helen, breaking free from a victim's assumption of guilt and shame over childhood sexual abuse by her father, through bonds with a pet rat, new friends and a deep fascination with Beatrix Potter and the Lake District in England. Beautiful creation on many fronts.

The Pickwick Papers by Dickens is a joyful discovery. I am taking in a chapter a night before bed and finding the slow pace and elaborate language wonderfully alien to our hectic existence in the modern world.

And then, like a miracle, just as I find myself surprised that I gave up so much of my inner life to work long hours when it no longer seems clear that it was necessary ... I discover a resonance of doubt about the sanity of 21st century capitalist lifestyles in a friend's poems.

The friend is Paul Strickland, someone who has always cared about writing and reading and struggles, like so many of us, to find a place for both in his life. His poem "Work Liberates" is a ten line question about why we let our personalities become submerged in corporate profit motives. It ends, on a cynical note, with: "To work is to pray." His longer poem, "Lunacy", paints vignettes of moments in history where we took a wrong turn in chosing our icons, marching towards a starker, darker world of greed and aggression. Paul is a closet poet. I would like to see his work appear before the public some day.

Books in the Bag: Conversion Trip

Finished Paddy Clarke: ha ha ha by Roddy Doyle, a Booker Prize winner for 1993, during trip to Calgary this weekend to attend Conversion; on the home stretch with Neil Miller's Sex-Crime Panic by alyson books and finished Sword of Shannara which I've been meaning to have a look at since I met and chatted with author Terry Brooks at a previous con. Started The Spark of Life: Darwin and the Primeval Soup by Christopher Wills and Jeffrey Bada, bought Elisabeth Vonarburg's Dreams of the Sea and gulped down big meaty chunks of Samuel Pepys: the Unequaled Self by Claire Tomalin while driving home. Well, David was driving. Curious that I seem to be much better able to read in a moving car now, than I could when I was a child. Both the Pepys biography and Paddy Clarke came to me as gifts from David's half sister Katrina, along with a marvelous biography of the city of London, England, which I have only tasted so far. I am trying to weed books out of the house in preparation for renovations so I have many stirred up and out of place, bringing them to my attention afresh. I have been carrying around The Elements of Grammar by Margaret Shertzer for those five minute reading opportunities. Delighted to discover, at the con, that I can look forward to The Lateral Truth: An apostate's Bible Stories by Whinter Davis, forthcoming from a new small press called Green Magpie Press, operating out of Calgary. Even the Stones by Marie Jakkober was on sale at the Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy booth, at conversion, and I attended a reading from it by Marie. I have already read the book. Enjoyed the reading by Rebecca Bradley, author of the Gil series, of a pre-history work she is in progress with. The story features outcasts from a hunter-gatherer culture, in the aftermath of a plague. Bradley is an anthropologist as well as a talented writer, and makes both an entertaining and plausible go of it.