etc.

Picked this up at the Literary Press Group of Canada booth at a library conference this weekend. It’s an English translation of a French book and a quick amazon search tells me that it’s also been translated into Spanish. It’s about Charlene, a precocious, neurotic, obsessive-compulsive teenager with poor self-esteem and a dysfunctional family. All these factors coupled with plain old teenage angst leads her to cling obsessively to anyone who shows her the least bit of attention and, as it happens, one of the two people who show her the least bit of attention is also slightly psychotic herself, and it’s all disaster, hellfire, and damnation in the end. Or actually, in the beginning. The book opens with Charlene writing her story in her prison cell at age 18. I’m often weary of all-out damning a translation because I’m never sure who might be to blame (author or translator), so suffice it to say that it’s not a great book but not a terribly bad one either. The whole teen-turmoil formula is explored quite well but it was seriously lacking in some key elements like context and motivation.

• Reached a personal conference-swag best today: 15 free books collected in under an hour. Yet another way am getting better at conferencing.

• Acquired old Freedom to Read posters from previous years as well as many good ideas for a challenged books display for library during Freedom to Read week. Event celebrates 20th anniversary this year.
• Met three other bloggers for the first time (Mita, Steven, and John). Was partly surreal and partly just plain cool. Disappointed that time constraints furnished mere minutes to chat, note to self to have a cuppa tea with all three at earliest convenience.
• Am bursting with even more librarian zeal today.
• Learned that the convention centre is completely wireless and was surprised that the conference organisers didn’t do more to promote this. Know at least a dozen other people who could have benefited from this foreknowledge.
• Heard from editors that the manuscript will be sent to publisher in a couple of weeks. Was asked for an author bio and assume link to about page will be insufficient. For all the meta-analysis that goes on around here, am stumped by inability to talk about oneself in 100 words or less.

I’ve been conferencing today and will be for the next two days. Every time I attend a conference, I seem to get better at it. I’ve given up thinking that the sessions get better every year, instead I’m now convinced that I’ve just gotten better at reading conference programs and picking out sessions that I will like and are pertinent to what I do. Not to take anything away from the sessions I attended today, of course. One in particular had to do with integrating media awareness into information literacy programs to promote critical thinking and provide students with a vocabulary to resist media conglomeration. The session was a complete energizer because this is just the sort of politicky-media-inequity stuff I want to sink my teeth into at work and having real, tangible examples of how one library made it happen is invaluable.

I’m bursting with librarian zeal today.

Apart from conferencing, I’m preparing to spend the weekend with Graham Swift, M. T. Anderson, and Ann-Marie MacDonald and setting aside some time to think about an article I’ve promised to an online publication on my experiences as a publishing neophyte. I enjoy writing these low-threat online pieces and I’ve started actively seeking out other avenues for similar work, both for library-related stuff and other non-fiction/non non-fiction I’ve been spending a little bit of time on.

I’ll also be devoting some time this weekend to waiting anxiously for someone I’ve never met to have her baby already.

It’s hundreds of years in the future and kids are flying off to Mars for spring break and the moons of Jupiter for summer vacation. They’re all wired into a central information/intelligence system (the Internet on steroids) and are therefore constantly receiving bytes of information in the form of advertising that is targeted to their own particular wants and needs, which are, conveniently enough, culled from their virtual consumption habits and stored in “customer profiles” on some server somewhere. If this is all sounding somewhat dystopian to you, it’s because it is: the “feeding” is being done by the corporations who control the whole network. Anderson has essentially written a cautionary tale about the destruction of the planet (universe, actually, since even Mars is a wasteland), human intelligence, social cohesion, civil liberties, free will, and all that stuff we take for granted, all at the hands of rampant and soul-destructive consumerism. And none of it is heavy-handed preachy moralising because there’s a lovely human story being told as well, making this one of those YA novels that everyone should read, YA or not.

A bizarre little book that I forgot all about the moment I finished it. Daniel Adamson is a man with a penchant for women’s ears, making his tongue his sexual weapon of choice and the novel, which is a discontinuous bean-spilling told in rambling fits and starts, an elaborate metaphor for his sharp appendage. I did learn that the tongue is the only muscle in the body that is not attached at both ends, but apart from that this is a fairly forgettable novel that, while it served it’s purpose (2 hr. bus-ride home in a snow storm with no book on hand), I wouldn’t really recommend for anything other than absolutely desperate bookless situations.

I adored the Adrian Mole books when I read them as a teenager, Townsend’s acerbic wit did complete justice to the neuroses of youth and I loved that Adrian was so literary. Unfortunately, grown up Adrian post-marriage with child merely came off as annoying in his cluelessness. He’s still as neurotic and self-absorbed as ever, still fancies himself an undiscovered gem of sorts, still boggled by all manner of outlandish situations, still a product of his wildly dysfunctional family and upbringing, and still pining unrequitedly after Pandora Braithwaite (now a Labour MP and “the smartest woman in Britain”). Problem is, at 30+ all this isn’t so cute anymore. Select bits of this book are funny, but as a franchise character, Adrian Mole is well past his prime.

wet ingredients
3½ cups shredded carrots
4 eggs
1 cup vegetable oil
¾ cup brown sugar
(optional: 1 cup raisins)

dry ingredients
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 tablespoon baking powder
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon

Sift dry ingredients & set aside.
Beat wet ingredients until well blended.
Fold wet in with dry.
If you’re using raisins soak them in some water for a few minutes to plump them up then add them in here.
Spoon into greased or cup-lined muffin tray.
Bake 20-25 minutes in preheated 350°F oven.
Makes 12.

Before I read this novel I might have assumed that it was impossible to enjoy a novel whose protagonist you intensely despise. David Lurie is a washed up, middle-aged, communications professor whose sexual indiscretions lead him to a life of marginalised disgrace, and yes, I thought he was intensely despicable. Having been fired for sexual harassment of a student, he floats through his days occupying a dubious moral highground where he steadfastly refuses to display any sort of public remorse or repentance for taking advantage of his position of power. His adamance is frustratingly asocial, I couldn’t help but think of him as childishly obstinate in his refusal to just suck it up and go through the motions of social apology and reform, but then that wouldn’t have been a novel worth writing I suppose.

So he leaves Capetown, visits his daughter Lucy on her failed co-op farm in the Eastern Townships, and immerses himself in the simplicity of country life. An attack on the farm, and Lucy and David, changes the dynamics of the father-daughter relationship, and the rest of the book is sort of damage control and disaster management. Lucy herself is almost as irritating a character as David and the decisions she ultimately makes for her future are completely inexplicable at best, but Coetzee does a great job on the politics of rural life in the Townships, and for me that was the difference between an average book with a couple of annoying characters and a decent book with a couple of annoying characters.

Domestic felicity is about having a sinky, enveloping couch to nestle into with a book and a coffee table upon which to prop one’s warmly-socked feet, freshly-baked carrot muffins steaming their carroty-spice goodness into the air, a bowl full of yellow, green, orange fruit that is ripe in the dead of winter, a generous and cozy hand-knit afghan freshly cleaned and draped over the arm of the couch for those unforseen shivery moments, having a steaming bath in an iron tub full of warmth and lavendar with only the light of the sun streaming in through the half-open blinds. I’m doing better this winter than I did last winter, I’m not cocooning as much, we’re making plans for daily walks in the park that is minutes away, and I’m finding my warmth in all the many nooks and shadows of our crazy-little-house.

I’m working on some things: an updated about page, a new bibliolatry.net with a shift in focus, some images, some art, the library presentation for next week, the cats’ blankets, two library-related articles that are due in an alarmingly short period of time, a stack of 8 holds from the public library that came in for me all at once, and spending, spending, spending leftover library money on critical theory and cultural studies reference books and language dictionaries. These are good activities, all of them.

If you’re following along at home, you will know that I’m reading a lot of audiobooks lately but I’m still being pretty utilitarian about them because once in a while I read a book that reminds me that there are some books that you just need to hold in your hands, appreciate the heft of, linger over the good bits, and soak in all the poetry and percipience. This is one of those books. It’s about Walter Selby and Frank Cartwright, a father and son with no discernible relationship who are ostensibly bound together by nothing more than common ancestry. Jim Lewis is the writer I wish I could be, his prose is vigorous and true, and his characters are so completely exposed that judging them would be insolent and unfair. This is the best novel I’ve read in a very long time.