• Flight Paths of the Emperor (1992)
• On Earth As It Is (1995)
• The Admen Move on Lhasa: Writing and Culture in a Virtual World (1997)
• The Shadow Boxer (2000)
• Afterlands (2004)
• Every Lost Country (2010)

I’m having trouble reading. I stopped reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward after 157 pages and I stopped reading Alex von Tunzelmann, Indian Summer: the Secret History of the End of an Empire after 153 pages and after almost two weeks and 235 pages I might put aside Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. The last is the most disappointing. I’ve been waiting to read this for years. Breaking up with a book: it’s not you; it’s me. Something about how he’s writing, how he’s telling the story and avoiding all the context I want somehow. I think I was spoiled by reading The Soul of a New Machine, and believing that anything about computers between 1955 and 1990 would be just as wonderful.

In 2010 I read Flight Paths of the Emperor as a palate cleanser, a short break, something completely different after reading, back-to-back, VS Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival and David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East. I finished Flight Paths of the Emperor late at night in a big chair at Our Town, in my new neighbourhood. Early June 2010, learning new streets and restaurants and reading books on a balcony with a view of the tallest poplar tree in Mount Pleasant. And in 2009 I read The Shadow Boxer over lunch in Kingsway, after we won our May campaign, walking up Stamford St to go to Cho Sun BBQ. And I finished it a week later in Port Alberni, drinking beer slowly, all day long. And most of all, reading Afterlands in 2008, in early December, after forgetting how to read over two campaigns and a brief gap of unemployment and an early snowfall and my first 50,000 word November. I read Afterlands in two days, reading all day and all night and learning how to read, how to take it all in at a glance and leave everything else out – how to disappear completely and never be found.

On Wednesday I went to Munro’s Books in Victoria, and today I went first to Book Warehouse on Broadway and then downtown to the Chapters on Robson and finally found Every Lost Country, brand new in paperback.  To quote: “A glorious novel” / “A stunning new novel” / “A truly exceptional novel”

I enjoyed Russell Smith’s piece on e-readers this week in the Globe. What I can’t believe are the comments left on the online story. Some folks are genuine in trying to help him out, explaining the  32b v. 64b. kernel issues, or debating UBS cables. Some are less helpful and even critical that someone with such limited technological capacity is writing about e-readers. My favourite: “Wow, technology articles written by people who don’t know anything about technology. Classic Globe and Mail.” Then there are a raft of comments comparing and contrasting various brands of e-reader. It is only on the third page of the comments that someone named ‘wildeyed’ calls it out: “It is astonishing to me that so many people can be such vehement defenders of e-readers and the underlying technology while evidently being incapable of understanding the simple and entertaining message of this small essay.”

I agree with Russell Smith. In a sense it’s a question of risk: the same reason we are more comfortable jaywalking than boarding an airplane. The odds of my paper book being soaked with water and therefore unusable are probably much greater than the odds of my e-reader choosing to spontaneously malfunction. But I know what will cause my paper book to breakdown: in this hypothetical case, a large quantity of water. I know what steps to take to avoid such a disaster. I can avoid an oncoming bus, and do, when I jaywalk, but there’s nothing I can do about jet engine failure.

Suppose my e-reader has a 98% success rate; that’s still a 2% higher failure rate than my book. The comments go on and on about how easy an e-reader actually is and these folks continue to miss the point. This is what I always hated about reading and writing about music: the tendency to stop talking about music and instead descend to technological cock-waving. I don’t really care about e-readers one way or the other – I don’t use one but do not begrudge those that do – but I do regret this: the commodification of the act of reading, and the resulting consumer one-upmanship.

Cancer Ward (536 pg.) is about as big as I can comfortably get on the bus, or at a bar in between periods of a hockey game or bands at a rock show. And to add another element of technological determinism: as I increasingly carry books with me not in my little shapeless green bag but tucked beside my laptop in my bigger but fitted black bag. I could get away with Nixonland in the green bag, but the black bag is less forgiving.

But it’s also a matter of commitment and the lens of memory. I don’t like to read books together, I like to go right through, alone, so to read a big book is to consign my imagination to one book alone for weeks. And as such, that book is my memory lens for those several weeks, the key to walking back through where I was then.

My summer of 2009 is framed by three books. I remember the shorter books too, but not in context, and they aren’t my association, for the simple fact that while I may sink in just as deeply, I may only spend a day or two inside. If I had spent two weeks with Divisadero or The Only Snow in Havana they might be just as determining as the big books I did read but no, I raced right through and have kept just impressions in memory. What I do have, from my summer of 2009: Keith Maillard, Difficulty at the Beginning (1007 pg, over 4 volumes); Don DeLillo, Underworld (827 pg); and Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: the Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America. (748 pg.) These books are the frame due to the time I spent with them and their scope. And neither the scope or the time could have occurred without the page count.

So I agree about big books and the categorical distinction. (Which is, of course, relative itself. 280pg is my Platonic form, but a formal Big Book needs ‘heft,’ not mere page count. ‘Heft,’ wonderfully, is a variable term. VS Naipaul, The Enigma of Arrival is a ‘big book’ with ‘heft’ because that’s how I read it, even though it has just 354 pages) What I don’t like is the ‘belt-notch’ factor. I didn’t listen to a Bob Dylan record until I could find a context for listening to a Bob Dylan record (that context, in a cute but unplanned segue, was reading Nixonland in July 2009) that extended beyond the ‘belt-notch’: the need to listen to a Bob Dylan record because I should have listened to a Bob Dylan record by now. The Everest analogy is apt: this is the because-it’s-there theory of reading. Even worse, imagine working from a list, the eat-your-vegetables theory of reading; the reason many people don’t.

I don’t like the belt-notch/Everest question, tallying books for some absurd future swordfight, but I do like the guiding Stockholm-syndrome analogy – as Elizabeth Minkel rephrases, the idea of a book having ownership of its reader. And I have to admit to some sympathy for the Everest question on consideration: read a big book because it’s there, sure – it’s all arbitrary, including the four months in 2010 during which I only read books with black-white-red spines. But there’s no intrinsic virtue in a big book – only the virtue you manage to glean.

The Great Game is the outlier here, written not as contemporary journalism but as narrative history. But the Great Game, as a long and tortured cold war across what is now Afghanistan, is the frame for the wars that have swept through since. The shift from game to war: The Great Game vs. The Hidden War vs. The Unexpected War. But the wars in question were not hidden in Afghanistan, nor were the wars in question unexpected in Afghanistan. But of course none of these are actually about Afghanistan at all.

Each of these accounts is written from the perspective of the invading nation and it is in the shifting perspective of the invader that we track the history. From the British Empire vs the Tsar, to the Soviet Union, and then to a quasi-NATO, post-Warsaw Pact, pseudo-peacekeeping force. Canada, then, is heir to the Soviets and the Raj insofar as imperial ambitions and political designs are considered. Britain was explicit in seizing territory in the name of the Empire. The Soviets invaded in the name of their people. Canada arrived in the name of the Afghanis.

This imperial angst is somewhere near the core of the desperate jingoism that Canada has tried to surround the Afghanistan ‘mission’ (not war) in – soldiers holding flags before puck drop at the Saddledome; Don Cherry saluting the dead each Saturday night on Coach’s Corner; a Tim Horton’s outlet opening on the base; the Stanley Cup in Kandahar. Our Prime Minister: Commander in Chief; Hockey Fan. Now, as the mission winds down, the army is selling off surplus gear, and each news story takes care to mention that included among the tents and grommets and windshields is a collection of hockey equipment, lightly used.

It is one version of Soviet history that stakes the start of the war in Afghanistan, Brezhnev’s invasion, as the start of the end of it all. The final, failed imperial excursion. The last gasp of the tsar. This is the history that sees Russian imperial angst travel in a straight line from the Tsar to the Comintern to Putin standing over his slain white tiger. Trace the same trail from the Great Game to the Boer War to Dieppe and finally to Canada, today, selling off a bag of hockey gear in the desert of Kandahar.

Of course I’ll keep reading after 30. I’ll keep buying books and rereading old books and reading about new books and I’ll probably still be writing about books. But it will be different. I’ll be on borrowed time. I’m still in a window, for now – I can still read with impunity.

Part of not reading, not really reading for three months was not really writing either, about books or about reading or about anything important. Or, rather, writing things that simply don’t make any sense outside of where I was through the spring.

• Ian Fleming, Doctor No (1958) – from Magus Books in Seattle.
• Ian Fleming, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963) – from Magus Books in Seattle.
• Paul Auster, The Music of Chance (1990) – More old Auster. From Magus Books in Seattle.
• Victor Sebestyen, Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire (2009) – written in chunks, country-to-country. I’ve never really read the reporting of this period and this seems like an easy place to start. From Magus Books in Seattle.
• Alan Furst, The Foreign Correspondent (2006) – From Magus Books in Seattle.
• Timothy Garton Ash, The File: A Personal History (1997) – A personal history as explored through the now-opened Stasi files from the other side of the Berlin wall. This is the thrill of used bookstores, and the value of looking at each and every book in the “conspiracy/espionage” section because you never know when something like this will simply appear. From Magus Books in Seattle.
• Joseph O’Neill, Blood-Dark Track: A Family History (2001) – Personal history by the guy who wrote Netherland, which I really really enjoyed last month. From Magus Books in Seattle.
• Patricia Highsmith, Ripley Under Ground (1970) – From Magus Books in Seattle.
• Alan Furst, The Spies of Warsaw (2008) – From PulpFiction on Main.
• Natalie Goldberg, Long Quiet Highway (1993) – A memoir. From Magus Books in Seattle.
• Joseph Lanza, Elevator Music: A Surreal History of Muzak, Easy-Listening, and Other Moodsong  (1994) – Yet another part of the ongoing exploration of my own relationship to Karen Carpenter. I’m always thrilled to hear Steely Dan in Muzak form. From Magus Books in Seattle.
• Ben Watt, Patient: The True Story of a Rare Illness (1996) – the guy from Everything But The Girl got really sick in 1994 and wrote a book all about it. From Magus Books in Seattle.
• Paul Theroux, The Great Railway Bazaar (1975) – From PulpFiction on Main.
• Paul Auster, Sunset Park (2010) – More new Auster. From Magus Books in Seattle.
• John le Carre, The Looking Glass War (1965) – From PulpFiction on Main.
• Katie Hafner and John Markoff, Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier (1991) – Still my very favourite secret history of the moment. This is a new library I am working on: computers, and the people that surround them, in post-war US history. Big business and small business and espionage and history in simplest sense: how we ended up where we are today. From Magus Books in Seattle.
• Mark Hume, The Run of the River: Portraits of Eleven British Columbia Rivers (1992) – BC travelogue. From PulpFiction on Main.
• Bruce Serafin, Stardust (2007) – Essays. From PulpFiction on Main.
• Todd Tucker, Atomic America: How a Deadly Explosion and a Feared Admiral Changed the Course of Nuclear History (2009) – Another addition to my nuclear library. from Magus Books in Seattle.
• Craig Nelson, Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon (2009) – Official history, written for an official audience. From PulpFiction on Main.

• Paul Auster, In The Country of Last Things (1987) – Still more Auster. I read them so fast, I need to keep my reserves up. A positive balance. From PulpFiction on Main.
• VS Naipaul, Guerillas (1975) – From PulpFiction on Main.
• Joan Didion, Run River (1963) – From PulpFiction on Main.
• Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness (2009) – Maybe the last Alice Munro book I will ever buy, because now I have them all. From Book Warehouse on Broadway.
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward (1968) – I am reading this right now. What a wonderful edition, solid and unforgiving. What a wonderful book. From PulpFiction on Broadway.
• John Le Carre, The Secret Pilgrim (1990) – From Book Warehouse on Broadway.
• Patricia Highsmith, Nothing That Meets The Eye: The Uncollected Stories (1938-1982) – I have to stop buying her books because when I read them I freak out and feel awful. But I love that books can do that, so here’s another great big anthology. From PulpFiction on Broadway.
• Kristin Hersh, Rat Girl (2010) – I’ve meant to order this for moths, and even wrote about it, months in advance, and here it is marked down to $6.99 or something incredible at Book Warehouse. From Book Warehouse on Broadway.
• Don DeLillo, Point Omega (2010) – From Book Warehouse on Broadway.
• Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up And Start Again: PostPunk 1978-1984 (2005) – Another secret history. From PulpFiction on Broadway
• Bill Mathews and Jim Monger, Roadside Geology of Southern British Columbia (2005) – A guide to the rocks and landscapes and the basic physical history of my province, written through the frame of the highways we’ve built around and across and through it all. From PulpFiction on Main.
• Matt Hern, Common Ground in a Liquid City: Essays in Defense of an Urban Future (2010) – My pal Ben recommended this and so did the guy at Pulp Fiction when I brought it up to the counter. I am curious to counterpose this to George Melnyk, New Moon At Batoche: Reflection on the Urban Prairie but I think it may be less myth and more technocrat. From PulpFiction on Main.

• Hugh Brody, Maps and Dreams (1988) – More histories of BC; recommended by my friend Renee even after we saw Mr. Brody discuss his friendship with Mr. Ignatieff at tedious length last summer. From PulpFiction on Main.
• Robert Sabbag, Down Around Midnight: a Memoir of Crash and Survival (2009) – I read more than half of this in March before I realized that, just like the books I’d tried before, I wasn’t actually reading it. I blame external factors – this is actually a pretty neat premise. Our hero the author is in a place crash in 1981(?) and takes steps, years later, to track down the other people in the crash, to learn how they’ve dealt with the memory, and to learn how it all connects in the end. I should start over. From Book Warehouse on Broadway.
• Philip Kerr, A Quiet Flame (2009) – More espionage, more glamourized 20^th century. From Book Warehouse on Broadway.
• Kenneth J Harvey, Inside (2006) – I just read this, a cheapo novel that was a fast read. Hard life in Atlantic Canada. I wasn’t that into it but I did enjoy it. In 2002 I would have been really into this book. From Book Warehouse on Broadway.
• John le Carre, The Mission Song (2006) – From Book Warehouse on Broadway.
• James Sullivan, Over The Moat: Love Among the Ruins of Imperial Vietnam (2004) – More secret history, public and private and travelogue. But also an interesting counterpart, genderwise, to Burmese Lessons. White-Man-finds-Viet-woman-to-love vs White-Woman-finds-Burmese-man-to-love. From PulpFiction on Main.
• Elizabeth Royte, Bottlemania: Big Business, Local Springs, and the Battle over America’s Drinking Water (2008) – Boring, boring, boring but also cheap, fun, fast. From Book Warehouse on Broadway.
• Margaret MacMillan, Nixon in China: The Week that Changed the World (2006) – The big official history of big officials doing big official things.  From Book Warehouse on Broadway.
• Harry Harrison, Make Room! Make Room! (1966) – The original draft of Soylent Green. I remember over-population and Thomas Malthus but I can’t remember the last time these things mattered as a public crisis. From PulpFiction on Main.
• Marshall N Klimasewiski, The Cottagers (2006) – A cheapo first novel set in Sooke and featuring tourists. From Book Warehouse on Broadway.
• Paul Theroux, The Kingdom By The Sea: A Journey Around the Coast of Great Britain (1983) – A counterpoint to Simon Winchester, Outposts – home base against the colonies. From PulpFiction on Main.
• Dave King with Eric Duhatschek, King of Russia: A Year in the Russian Super League (2007) – Two of my favourite things: hockey and post-Soviet Russian travelogue. But I am ready, oh so ready, for disappointment. From Book Warehouse on Broadway.
• Jim Walsh, All Over But the Shouting: An Oral History of the Replacements (2007) – A history of the Replacements through collage: interviews from across the last 30 years. In the category of bands I maybe should like more than I do, bands I forget to listen do, and maybe a band, like Luna, that I’ll appreciate more through history. From PulpFiction on Main.
• Fred Wah, Diamond Grill (1996) – My friend Renee talks about this book and it looks so wonderful, all about British Columbia on several levels. From PulpFiction on Main.
• Boyce Richardson, Strangers Devour the Land (1976) – The history, public and private, of the construction of the massive James Bay hydroelectric projects in Quebec. From Book Warehouse on Broadway.

• JM Coetzee, Summertime (2009) – Part three in this set of pseudo-memoir, of which I have only read part two. From PulpFiction on Main.
• Margaret Atwood, Negotiating With the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002) – Writing is reading and if I do have to start writing, somehow, someday, then I’ll have to keep reading about writing. From PulpFiction on Main.
• David Kaplan, The Silicon Boys and their Valley of Dreams (1999) – I feel there is some secret history at work here but that’s just the shadows of The Soul of a New Machine left in me. But if every book is rewritten as I read it, if what I bring to the table is my experience of any book I’ve ever read, then what I bring to this, a lameo set of business-porn profiles from Wired magazine or something, is a context of: military-industrial complex; espionage; economic development in the post-war United States; unintended consequences. Secret history. From PulpFiction on Main.
• Zadie Smith, White Teeth (2000) – The biggest book of 2002? Finally in an edition that won’t crack all over the spine like the first paperback edition that I see everywhere. This is in every used bookstore I ever go to but it’s always cracked along the spine. Maybe I am the only person who didn’t read this at the time. From PulpFiction on Main.
• ed. Lee Gutkind, The Best Creative Non-fiction Vol. 1 (2007) – I haven’t been reading anthologies in over a year. I may have not read an anthology, in fact, since I read the same, Vol. 2, of the best Creative Non-fiction. But it matches on my shelf, you see, and I am glad to have this on hand. From PulpFiction on Main.
• Andrew Meier, Black Earth: A Journey through Russia After the Fall (2003) – I very nearly bought this from Powells in Portland on a trip there with my friend Rich and others in 2006. In fact I wrote down the title so that I could track it down one day. And here it is, Russia After the Fall, on the shelf at my local neighbourhood shop, just down the street. From PulpFiction on Main.
• Paul Auster, The Brooklyn Follies (2006) – More Auster, more Auster. From PulpFiction on Main.
• Howard Kalman, Ron Phillips and Robin Ward, Exploring Vancouver: The Essential Architectural Guide (1994) – I grew up with this, reading my father’s copy. Some of the buildings are gone now but that makes it all the more valuable. From PulpFiction on Main.
• John McPhee, Annals of the Former World (1998) – Another history, a geological history of the continent but also a story of how it was written, across the continent. I’m excited to spend a month with this. From PulpFiction on Main.
• Emma Donoghue, Room (2010) – A gift from my mother. I don’t know anything about it! But it was on the ‘lists’ all year long.
• John Heileman and Robert Halperin, Game Change (2010) – I read this in just two days or something in January. It was hardly there at all. From PulpFiction on Main.

This belief that I hold: that reading a novel is in itself a creative act, that we all take in a different text rewritten by what we bring into a novel from our own lives. And if I have no creative energy left to give, nothing left to put out then I can only stare at a page, I can read the words but there are no sentences, no paragraphs, no shape or arc or structure. I saved the pile of books that I tried to read, books that I started at and stared at. Books that I’ll come back to, one day, maybe soon. It’s not them; it’s me.

Last night I described campaign work, my entire 2011 to date, as clear, narrow, focus, a ‘singularity of purpose.’ The world is a three-block radius in which you get every meal from among the same three or four restaurants every day. All year we used military metaphors: civilians, shore leave, tour of duty, trenches. And when I described my life last summer, I joked that I was entering my ascetic year, I would be a monk at 8^th and Fraser. Sometimes circumstances take care of these things, and I held a pilgrimage every day to New Westminster, SkyTrain stations as milemarkers. Monks, on a phone bank, reciting devotions to strangers and recording responses in code.

The question: what is the ‘take home’ from a speech, from an event or experience. What do you take away and what is the entry point to a set of memories. And my take home is what a 100-day campaign meant to my ability to read a book.

January

• John Heileman and Mark Halperin, Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime (2010) – I put down The Honourable Schoolboy for several days and went right through this. Go go go.
• John le Carre, The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) – I read this on the ferry to Victoria and back on New Year’s Eve, December 31 2011, and then again after Game Change.
• Ian Fleming, Diamonds Are Forever (1956) – I read this fast but I can’t remember a thing about it. I do remember this reading over lunch at the Vietnamese place at Broadway and Guelph.
• Elizabeth Hay, A Student of Weather (2000) – This is it, the first book I remember having out with me in New Westminster.
• Joan Didion, Miami (1987) – First I would get off at Columbia Station and go to the Starbucks to use up the three gift cards I had collected and never used. Man did I ever feel like a doofus waiting in the Starbucks for my coffee. When the gift cards ran out I would get off at New Westminster Station and go to the Waves, then walk up Columbia.

February

• Tom Zytaruk, Like A Rock: The Chuck Cadman Story (2008) – We were already starting to lose people to federal campaigns, and I lost several friend to Surrey North. It’s all the same fight, and I grew up just north of Whalley anyway. Unfortunately, I moved to Vancouver before I had the chance to vote against Chuck Cadman in 2004, but I did hand out flyers for the NDP against him in 1997.
• Artyom Borovik, The Hidden War: A Russian Journalist’s Account of the Soviet War in Afghanistan(1990) – I read Like A Rock in between the first and second sections of this, written respectively in 1987 and 1989.
• Janice Gross Stein and Eugene Lang, The Unexpected War: Canada in Kandahar (2007) – This book was a real downer.
• Russell Smith, Girl Crazy (2010) – This book was also a real downer. I read it in just a few days. No. 1 most depressing author I read, somehow.

March

• VS Naipaul, In A Free State (1971) – This book was also a real downer. No. 2 most depressing author I read, somehow.
• Paul Auster, Moon Palace (1989) – The only novel that held my attention. I came in one day, a weekend morning, and no one else was in, maybe there was an event or I was early and I had 10 pages left and I sat down at my desk and read to the end. More Paul Auster please.
• Preston Manning, Think Big: My Adventures in Life and Democracy (2002) – This is me declaring defeat, a truce, no more, I’m done. For another month of campaign, I’ll just read campaign. How did we get to this place in Canadian politics? Let’s go back, way back, to the Reform Party of Canada, 1987.

April

• Trevor Harrison, Requiem For A Lightweight: Stockwell Day and the Rise of Image Politics (2002) – I went to a rally in high school, early fall of 2000, at the Hyatt downtown, against Stockwell Day; the button I took home read DoomsDay for Canada. I read this before, in 2004.
• Susan Delacourt, Juggernaut: Paul Martin’s Campaign for Jean Chretien’s Crown (2004) – No. 1 most pathetic tale of hubris in Canadian history. I could read this book over and over.
• Paul Wells, Right Side Up: The Fall of Paul Martin and the Rise of Stephen Harper’s New Conservatives  (2006) – I read this before too, after the first time I read Juggernaut, in 2006. At this point, my capacity to take in new information was severely limited.

September

• Ann Patchett, Bel Canto (2001) – I wanted more from this but I’m not really sure on what level, or how I’d set my expectations in the first place. Maybe the best example I can think of for the technique Stephen King explains: don’t plot, just build a setting and let the story happen. Almost nothing happens in this book, in a sense, but the setting builds its own characters and the story comes out.
• Ian Fleming, Casino Royale (1953) – Hooray, this was great and the best thing is that there are so many more, just like this.
• Cliff Stoll, The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage (1989) – I’ve been working on a piece about computers that I will probably abandon. This was nice to read in the wake of Soul of a New Machine: the vague sense of dread that hung around that book came in clearly here. But it is also a memoir: the real day-to-day life of our protagonist, his understated little moral quandary, is what makes this more wonderful than just an “intriguing introduction to the futuristic world of international computer networking,” no matter how much fun that is on its own.
• Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (2004) – I read this in Surrey, looking after my mother’s dog for a week and finished on the night of my first lecture of my last course at SFU. And it is really good, a wonderful study of structure in memoir and in memory itself. I finished this at Steamworks – I wanted to have a beer and read a book every week after my class but I don’t actually like Steamworks very much.
• Alice Munro, Who Do You Think You Are? (1978) – My annual Alice Munro short stories.
• Jim Thompson, Savage Night (1953) – This was so short and I really had to fight with it. Not what I needed to read at that point in the month, the year.
• Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride (1993) – I loved this. Something that I thought about w/r/t Wilderness Tips when I read it back in 2002 was the strangeness of Margaret Atwood as the major mainstream Canadian author when her books are so marginal. The reoccurance of what I would term “crystal people” – Charis, in this case – and this specific Toronto thing. But I would see that all as marginal – I’m from a different place. But it is a small slice of the country, I feel. Smaller than I ever imagined, growing up and knowing that Margaret Atwood was a big deal.

October

• Russell Smith, How Insensitive (1994) – I loved this book no matter how sad it was. My friend Clea says that I’ll be really happy in my 30s and this little novel is all about that, the awful desperation of it all. I keep looking back, what I might have been doing in the world if I had not ended up in politics and I can see a path that looks something like this, the seriousness and total bleakness of being young in a big city.
• Lorna Jackson, Cold-Cocked: On Hockey (2007) – The best hockey book I have ever read. Just what I wanted: someone to problematize the fan relationship, the fe/male gaze, the cult. Not from a critical perspective but as a fan, someone who loves hockey and loves the team and loves the players and asks why. An honest personal memoir of a really smart writer who knows how stupid hockey is and how stupid it is to be a hockey fan. The part of my life in which I exercise the least agency is the part of my life where I am a hockey fan and I’ve never before read a book that understood that.
• William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (2003) – What a downer. I’d been led to expect so much more, something spy/something perceptive/something that might tell me something, anything. But it is a badly-plotted spy story padded with reheated Adbusters theory. There was lots I wanted to like but the last thing you ever want from a spy story is to be cheated at the end and that’s how I felt!
• Alan Furst, Night Soldiers (1988) – I was reading this forever. Two weeks? I can’t remember what happens but I can recall the time periods and the map: Bulgaria, Spanish Civil War, Paris, Vichy France. Again, the maxim to write scene, not plot; what does it mean when all I can recall is scene, not plot? I finished this in my room at the Empress hotel in Victoria.
• Russell Smith, Young Men (1999) – Just as with How Insensitive, I didn’t read this as having any “comic potential” or as “terribly funny” but rather as really depressing. Which, as with all of it, says more about me than about Russell Smith.
• Paul Auster, Leviathan (1992) – I can’t remember a thing about this now. I do remember reading it at Granville Island on a Saturday at the end of October and I also remember reading it at a club on Granville St, drinking beer and waiting for the Grapes of Wrath.

November

• Dean Wareham, Black Postcards: A Rock and Roll Romance (2008) – Luna was a ‘utility band,’ a band that seemed to always have a new record and always come to town on a two-to-three years cycle and always had a pile of mid-‘90s albums on the rack at Charlie’s Music City on Granville. Especially Pup Tent, for some reason. But this is Dean Wareham’s memoir of the whole Luna story and his own take on the whole Galaxie 500 story and it fills in the texture of a whole run of otherwise faceless records that I’m suddenly listening to all the time. And somehow there is also this whole new window on what was going on in the 1990s, what someone my age now might have known then.
• Bret Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero (1985) – Oh man what a bleak grind of a book.
• Vladimir Nabokov, Laughter In The Dark (1938) – There’s almost nothing about this that I remember, aside from the hockey scene and the fact that since I finished this I have not been back to the Whip, where I read at least part of every book I finished this summer. It’s been cold and dark and now I’m working 12 hour days in New Westminster. I’ll go back next summer, a bright summer patio.
• Anthony Swofford, Jarhead: A Marine’s Chronicle of the Gulf War and Other Battles (2003) – Gulf War lit; nothing really happens. I read this fast and finished it at St Augustine’s between periods of a hockey game.
• Simon Winchester, Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire (1985) – What a wonderful thing. The sad end of empire, and in a sense a show-up of what a ridiculous plan it always was, anyway.
• Matt Cohen, Elizabeth and After (1999) – My favourite novel of the fall. Just what you need; small town Ontario and family history and it’s paint-by-numbers, maybe, but sometimes it is just what you need.
• Teri Hein, Atomic Farmgirl: Growing Up Right in the Wrong Place (2000) – Another entry in my ongoing history of hazardous waste and the Hanford site in Washington state. But also another fascinating study of structure in memoir and memory. Just enough nuclear history to shade the day-to-day family story in the colours of the Cold War.

December

• Duff Wilson, Fateful Harvest: The True Story of a Small Town, a Global Industry, and a Toxic Secret (2001) – This was better than Atomic Farmgirl in that it is more lurid but also in how matter-of-fact it is about the commonly accepted practice of relabeling toxic waste as fertilizer and selling it to farmers. The best parts are the explorations into the state-by-state regulatory regimes and how they are developed in plain sight but without any attention. This is actually how things tend to work.
• Alvah Simon, North To The Night: A Spiritual Odyssey in the Arctic (1998) – This was really wonderful, the trip to and from a frozen bay in the Canadian north, one guy alone with a cat in a small boat.
• Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000) – I read this to and from Lonsdale, meeting my dad at a pub to watch a hockey game. And also to New Westminster and back, meeting my mom and aunt and sister for dinner. Kinda like Black Postcards – I haven’t read very much by Stephen King but now I have a texture for everything he’s done.
• J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man (2005) – What a miserably frustrating book. I yelled at it: ‘what are you doing? What are you even trying to do here?’ But I can’t imagine what I’d be if all I read were spy novels and journalist accounts of toxic waste scandals.
• John le Carre, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy (1974) – I took a ‘Philosophy of Art’ class with my friend Rich at SFU in 2002 and in the textbook there was a chapter titled “What is Going On in a Dance?” and more than anything else from that course, that question stuck with me. So I ask: what is going on in a spy novel? I explained this book again to my dad as the anti-Bond, the spy book where only one person dies and only two bullets are fired and the whole story takes chapters and chapters to unspool and only then, when it’s out, do you even get to why: why spy?
• John le Carre, The Honourable Schoolboy (1977) – I finished this in January but I’ll explain it here. Not as good as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, either in plot or in structure. There is this deliberate foreshadowing thing that does not work. I once read a take on le Carre: that he manages to completely unravel as soon as a pretty woman walks through his plots. I’ve never noticed it before now but there it is: the catalysts in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy are not necessarily rational but they are understandable. The catalysts here are not only irrational but unbelievable. I read this on the bus and the ferry, to and from Victoria on New Years Eve.

All from PulpFiction on Main St.

• James Morris, Pax Britannica: The Climax of an Empire (1968) – Part two of a history of the British Empire.
• James Morris, Farewell the Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat (1978) – Part three of the same.
• Paul Theroux, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star: On The Tracks of the Great Railway Bazaar (2008) – Through Asia by train. Hoping to find a copy of Great Railway Bazaar before I read this.
• V.S. Naipaul, An Area of Darkness: A Discovery of India (1964) – Just another book about modern India; just another book by mean old VS Naipaul.
• John Berger, Photocopies (1996) – Really looking forward to reading this. “A collection of moments, each supremely vivid, that together make up a frieze of human history at the end of the millennium as well as a subtle and affecting self-portrait of their author.”
• Karen Connelly, Burmese Lessons (2009) – A travelogue, memoir of Burma in the 1990s and one of last year’s Big Books.
• Samuel R. Delaney, Dhalgren (1974) – The question here: is this book even readable? 800 or so pages of “[a] secret masterpiece, the city-book-labyrinth that has swallowed astonished readers alive for almost 30 years.” I mean, ok,  so Dhalgren “creates a mirror for the oceanic density of our times,” but it’s not clear to me that I’ll actually be able to read it.
• Alan Furst, Dark Voyage (2004) – Another spy novel.
• Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2000) – I read this two weeks ago; what a wonderful book.
• William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984) – Again, I didn’t really enjoy Pattern Recognition but I’ll give this ‘modern classic’ a chance. I knew the first line before I’d even opened the book!
• Olen Steinhauer, The Tourist (2009) – A new spy novel, no less than four comparisons to John le Carre on the cover, and a note inside that film options have been bought by George Clooney.
• Hugh Barker and Yuval Taylor, Faking It: The Quest for Authenticity in Popular Music (2007) – Looking forward to the chapter on disco and also hoping, maybe beyond hope, for some examination of The Carpenters.
• Simon Winder, The Man Who Saved Britain: A Personal Journey into the Disturbing World of James Bond (2006) – Again, I didn’t know I was looking for this book until I found it on the shelf. James Bond at the end of the empire: “cultural history, biography, and memoir.”
• Robert Baer, See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War on Terrorism (2002) – the ‘true story’ that ‘suggested’ the movie Syriana which I have watched maybe four times? I remember seeing it at the new theatre on Burrard with friends in 2006, we smuggled in a bottle of wine and everything.
• Patti Smith, Just Kids (2010) – A memoir of her life with Robert Mapplethorpe in New York in the late 1960s.
• Tom Bissell, Chasing The Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia (2003) – Another great big Central Asia travelogue, this one centered on Uzbekistan.

New books from way back, two months ago.

• J.M. Coetzee, Slow Man (2005) – I just read this. What a frustrating book. It is excellent and he is an excellent author but what is he even doing here? The only way I could read this was as a dialogue, within the plot, between the main character and JM Coetzee’s alter ego on the worth of the book. And there is some complex thing here about history and post-colonial settlement that went right past me because I was trying too hard to find another explanation of the ‘Elizabeth Costello’ character. From Russell Books in Victoria.
• J.M. Coetzee, Boyhood: Scenes from Provincial Life (1998) – After all that, I really can’t wait to read this. I now have 10 of his books on my shelf which seems like at least five too many. This is part one in his fictionalized (or is it?? Hmm??) autobiography. From Companion Books in Burnaby.
• Peter Clarke, The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire: The Demise of a Superpower, 1944-47 (2007) – What a great cover! And what a great moment in history. From Russell Books in Victoria.
• Russell Smith, Young Men (1999) – I read this in the three nights I was in Victoria at the end of October. I finally read How Insensitive earlier in the month and after spending almost two weeks reading Alan Furst, Night Soldiers I wanted this, exactly this: loosely linked short stories about Toronto. Young men, yeah – this book is a real downer. From Russell Books in Victoria.
• Alice Munro, The Progress of Love (1986) – I read this in 2005 when I found a pocket book copy in my co-op laundry room. This edition matches the rest of my Alice Munro books. From Russell Books in Victoria.
• Eric Ambler, A Coffin for Dimitrios (1939) – More spy books. From Russell Books in Victoria.
• Alan Furst, Kingdom of Shadows (2000) – Even more spy books. From Russell Books in Victoria.
• William Kittredge, A Hole In The Sky (1992) – A memoir of the American West, specifically Montana. “…an honest reckoning of the American myth that drove generations westward.” From Russell Books in Victoria.
• Martin Cruz Smith, Gorky Park (1981) – A mystery! But set in the Soviet Union so it is almost a spy book. From Russell Books in Victoria.
• Duff Wilson, Fateful Harvest: The True Story of a Small Town, a Global Industry, and a Toxic Secret (2001) – I read this in November. All about the simple transmutation of hazardous waste to fertilizer, a semantic redefinition from ‘waste’ to ‘product’ that means the difference between hundreds of thousands of dollars in disposal fees and tens of thousands of dollars worth of sales to farmers. What this means is containers of granular fertilizer on hardware store shelves that under any other name would require a hazmat suit for disposal. The regulatory agencies encourage this redefinition: gotta do something with this stuff, no one wants it around; might as well sell it and make a few bucks. So, go back to the original solution to pollution: dilution. Except this is cadmium and chromium and beryllium and lead, and we are eating the crops that we cover in this garbage. From Russell Books in Victoria.
• Greg Klerkx, Lost In Space: The Fall of NASA and the Dream of a New Space Age (2004) – NASA is analogous to how I felt for years about the RAV line. On one hand, it’s too expensive and we don’t need it. On the other hand, trains are really cool! And I feel this way too about space exploration, of course! Can I justify the massive expenditure of public funds, no, of course not, are you kidding, but man: space is really cool! From Russell Books in Victoria.
• Alan Furst, The Polish Officer (1995) – Yet another spy book! From Russell Books in Victoria.
• V.S. Naipaul, A Way In The World (1994) – I can’t wait to read this, but it might take me years to get to. “Spanning continents and centuries and defying literary categories.” From Russell Books in Victoria.
• Alice Munro, Friend Of My Youth (1990) – Now I have them all in matching editions, how nice to see on my shelf. From Companion Books in Burnaby.
• Jonathan Raban, Passage to Juneau: A Sea And Its Meanings (1999) – Another sailboat memoir, this one up the coast from Puget Sound to Alaska. From Companion Books in Burnaby.
• Patricia Highsmith, Strangers On A Train (1950) – “The menace that lurks in familiar surroundings.” I kept waiting to find a different set of editions but it seems these are all there is. From Russell Books in Victoria.
• Keith Maillard, Alex Driving South (1980) – I thought my little paperback copy was the last one around but here is the second copy I’ve ever seen of one of my favourite books. I had to go back a second time to pick it up from Brown’s Books in Burnaby.
• Keith Maillard, Dementia Americana (1994) – Poems, also from Brown’s Books in Burnaby.
• Keith Maillard, Cutting Through (1982) – And the last book I needed; this is the first draft, effectively, of the second half of ‘Difficulty at the Beginning”, which I read in May 2009. From Brown’s Books in Burnaby.
• Igor Larionov and Jim Taylor, Larionov (1990) – Igor Larionov’s ‘assisted memoir,’ just one year after securing release from the Red Army to play professional hockey in Vancouver. What a strange bit of history and what a strange lens to use: written by Jim Taylor, from the original Russian. From Russell Books in Victoria.
• Myrna Kostash, Bloodlines: A Journey Into Eastern Europe (1993) – Another travelogue of Eastern Europe but in the context of an Edmonton author who I know from George Melnyk, New Moon at Batoche: this is about Canada and the Ukraine and the people in between. From Companion Books in Burnaby.
• Dean Wareham, Black Postcards: A Rock & Roll Romance (2008) – This book is great! I always considered Luna a ‘utility band’: lots of records, not very interesting, a tour every two years, a great big stack of Pup Tent, from 1997, at Charlie’s Music City on Granville. But this book colours all of it in and gives texture to a bland band and of course now I listen to Luna records all the time. From Russell Books in Victoria.

And this was the intention of the ‘pocket book,’ a book for your pocket, a one-time-read. I remember reading once of a couple who would read a book together. Whomever started the book would tear off every 50 pages for the other to read, and so on, until a 300pg novel was torn into six sequential packets. A re-serialised novel. Single use.

- The spine of my copy of The Robber Bride was stiff and brittle and it was very hard to read. I had to keep checking: it’s bent far enough for me to read, it’s not far enough to crack. Past the midway point I could relax a little, it wouldn’t get any worse, at least. And the medium v. the message: that stiff spine affected how I read The Robber Bride and so affected what the book is to me now.

- My father borrowed my copy of Rudy Wiebe, Peace Shall Destroy Many, and lent it to his brother, my uncle. And one or the other of them broke the spine! In multiple places! So badly that the signatures are detached along the bottom! I didn’t understand, I asked him, “how did you do this?” and he didn’t understand; “that’s how you read a book,” he said.

He has a point. From another website about books, this comment: I actually really enjoy spine-breaking – it’s like the moment you break the seal on a new jar of coffee – ownership and anticipation combined. I only ever have coffee from a jar when I am camping, and I haven’t been camping since summer 2009, but I understand that. Ownership and anticipation. A process of incorporation.

- I have books with badly broken spines and they are hard to read. I am too conscious of making sure the book does not fall apart and I monitor my progress around the breaks.

I have only ever seen one copy of 1200 days: The NDP in Power, 1972-1975, I bought it used from Granville Book Company in 2002, I believe, before a rock show at the Commodore and I would hate to break it in two. I want to read it again, now, but I want to have it rebound.

- I face this when I find a book I’ve been looking for. The book is there, the spine is cracked; do I buy the book, or do I wait for another copy?

- This is a question of fetishisation but also of form v. function, medium v. message. How the physical directs the ephemeral and how, again, the book I read is not the book anyone else may read. Reader response criticism.