Anyway, I devoured Nothing to Envy in two days, and in fact I would have read it faster if I hadn’t been sick with a lousy cold and slammed with work at the same time — it was a page turner.

I’ve been considering why it was so compelling. Barbara Demick imparts an astounding amount of information about North Korean politics, economics, diet, language, social structure, prisons, markets, almost without the reader noticing, so caught up are we in the stories of the characters.

When I looked at it again, pencil in hand, I realized that the whole book is actually framed around a doomed love story between two North Koreans, with other characters’ stories woven in between.

The thing I find so interesting about this is that Demick lets reader knows very early — page 9 — that the love story won’t have a happy ending. So the tension that sustains this book isn’t a sappy will-the-boy-get-the-girl.  The tension comes from wondering how this relationship will unfold and unravel, and what it will all mean.

It’s a device she uses on a smaller scale with other characters, too. I admire this for a few reasons — first, because it works; second, because it reduces the amount of work the reader must do to keep up — these are complicated stories; third,   it strikes me as fundamentally honest. The writer knows how the story is going to end, and while readers don’t want the whole story thrown at them all at once, it’s refreshing to see the authorial strategy on the table. Once you’re re-reading the book, that is — there’s no way to catch any of this on the first go.

In her acknowledgments, Demick thanks John Hersey, who was her teacher (a very subtle way of saying she went to Yale, I suppose). She says that Hiroshima was an inspiration as she wrote her book — which has now led me to re-read Hiroshima. I’m in the midst of it now, too soon to say anything at all about it, but I’m curious to see if I can find the inspiration for one remarkable book in another.

Well who could blame them, really, it’s embarrassing to discuss how much we all care about life’s smelly sticky messes. Even while we’re all veddy veddy litch-er-ary.

Never letting a little hypocrisy stop me,  I started to think about what I read this year. It’s a task made much easier thanks to eReaders. I just need to look back at my Kindle and Nook accounts (read on iPad and phone) to know what I ordered and read in the past twelve months. This isn’t a complete list of what I read. For one thing, the NYPL recently changed its system, and I can’t figure out how to find a list of the books I checked out, nor do I have a complete list of books read on paper, many of which I bought at indie bookstores. But I do have my daily journal. Not every book made an appearance in my morning musings, but it’s a good enough record. And my idea here is to just record the books that were in some way meaningful to me.

I also think it’s funny when people apologize for reading books that aren’t newly published. Isn’t longevity the point of a book?

My list of meaningful books, 2011.

• Lia Purpura, On Looking
• Lewis Hyde, The Gift
• Mary Roach, Packing for Mars
• Andre Aciman, Alibis
• Best American Travel Writing 2011
• Best American Essays 2011
• Margaret Roach, And I Shall Have Some Peace There
• Sarah Vowell, Assassination Vacation (re-read)
• Nick Flynn, The Ticking is the Bomb
• Calvin Trillin, The Tummy Triology.
• Blue Nights, Joan Didion.
• Sarah Blackwell, How to Live: A Life of Montaigne.
• Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning. (Re-read)
• Michael Ondaatje, Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film
• Sven Birkerts, The Art of Time in Memoir
• Edwidge Danticat, Create Dangerously
• John D’Agata, About a Mountain
• Anne Elizabeth Moore, Cambodian Grrrrl
• Matthew Goodman, The Sun and the Moon
• Iphigenia in Forest Hills by Janet Malcolm
• Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick

I always read a lot of books on writing. Some of these I re-read this year since I started teaching at Gotham. But I like to read about writing, generally. These books influenced my thinking this year:

Janet Burroway, Writing Fiction
The Journals of Joyce Carole Oates
Marion Roach Smith, The Memoir Project
Adair Lara, Naked Drunk and Writing
Kim Robert Stafford, Muses Among Us (re-read)
Bonni Goldberg, Beyond the Words (re-read)
Barbara Tuchman, Practicing History (re-read)
Richard Rhodes, How to Write (re-read)
Annie Lamott, Bird by Bird (re-read)

I also do a bunch of reading for projects of various kinds. I read several manuals on etiquette, a book about mothers that kill, several books about incest. Also, typography, book jacket design, indie publishing. Also, a couple of books about the history of science fiction, several biographies of Edgar Allan Poe, a few books about Star Trek and a biography of Robert Goddard. Also several books about Christopher Columbus.

I bought scads more books than I read. There’s always next year.

Or perhaps you’ll pack more sensibly. Either way, start planning by reading a selection of my recent Toronto stories:

• The Politics of High Heels at the Bata Shoe Museum
• The Museum of Inuit Art
• Romancing the Hat at Liliput Hats.
• A Toronto Food Diary
• Cupcake Decorating Class at Le Dolci
• Sake Brewery in the Distillery District at Spring Water Sake.

As he was nearly 98, I can’t say his death was unexpected. He had serious health problems that became more so after my grandmother died this past May. He was hospitalized this past September and I thought that was it. So did he. “I’m the death patient,” he’d say, by way of greeting, to the nurses. “This is a lousy hotel,” he’d say to me. And, when I tried to tell him that he was going to get through it, he knew I wasn’t entirely convinced of what I was saying. “Alison,” he said, “you just can’t beat the percentages.”

Well he did that time, and I suppose I just assumed that he’d keep doing it. I also imagined that at some point in the hazy future there would be another hospitalization and therefore a chance to say a proper goodbye. There wasn’t. That was probably for the best, in the bigger picture. But at this moment, I can’t help but wish it had been otherwise.

I am glad, though, that I had a chance to write about him a little, in a story that he inspired. (The Heat Seeker, for World Hum.)  When it was anthologized, he had the book special ordered at Barnes & Noble, and then asked to have his picture taken with it.

“I have only one objection,” he said, when I asked him what he thought of the piece.  “Why did you describe me as bald?” And laughed, as he ran his hand over his hair-free head.

**

Just about this time last year, he and my grandmother were getting ready to overwinter in Florida, as they always did.  Right before they left, he’d asked me for some of my recent writings, and I brought him a packet. “I’ll read every word and I’ll tell you what I think,” he said, as he took it from me. “But I’ll tell you right now, I think it’s very good.”

A food diary, from 36 hours in the Finger Lakes, mostly spent on Seneca Lake.

I was especially excited to visit Finger Lakes Distilling, the birthplace of my favorite craft gin.

A few photos I took during the trip. In retrospect, it something of a celebration of abundance.

In the Bata Shoe Museum’s storage closet…

At Liliput Hats…

Visiting Le Dolci’s cupcake decorating class…

Bar snacks at TOCA Bar, The Ritz-Carlton…

Dinner at Starfish Oyster Bed & Grill…

]]> http://verycuriousmind.wordpress.com/2011/11/16/scenes-from-toronto/feed/ 2 alisonwellner Curator's Tour of the Bata Shoe Museum's Artifact Storage Liliput Hats Le Dolci Cupcake Class TOCA Bar snacks Starfish oyster plate http://verycuriousmind.wordpress.com/2011/11/02/hating-california-not-really/ http://verycuriousmind.wordpress.com/2011/11/02/hating-california-not-really/#comments Wed, 02 Nov 2011 14:22:23 +0000 alisonwellner http://verycuriousmind.wordpress.com/?p=961 ]]>

I am a fitful presence on Twitter when I travel. Sometimes I say a lot. Sometimes I don’t say very much.

When I’m quiet, I have a sinking sense that I’m failing in some way, since some sort of constant infostream is what is expected from a modern member of the 21st century media.

But technology has not solved the problem of my monkey mind, which is to say, I know that my first impressions of a place can be unfair. I know I’m very often caught up in my own head and story — I’m tired, fighting a cold, upset about this or that — and anything I have to say is suspect until I have a chance to reflect, reconsider. Although I’m not planning a run for any elected office,  I dislike contradicting myself, later on, I’d rather wait until I’ve got 140 characters I’m really sure of.

For example, having just returned from California, I find my notes of first impression are all about hating it. It is not because I actually hate California — a state too big to hate in its entirety, for one thing, and for another, I do actually like it a lot, for a time, I considered living there.

But it so happens that I have twice been traveling in California when I have received horrible news from home.  I have walked up University Street in Berkeley on a beautiful fall day, sobbing. (And receiving only a few curious glances.)  I spent my first night ever in Los Angeles crumpled on a bathroom floor in my hotel room. Both times it made no sense to try to fly home earlier, so both times I spent a full day doing what I’d originally planned: a writing conference in Berkeley, dinner with my cousin; in Los Angeles a day of research, numbly taking in Rodeo Drive, Santa Monica, Venice. Perfectly lovely days of anguish, until I could catch the red eye home.

To be sure, I have made several trips to California where nothing bad has happened at all. Nothing terrible happened on this trip, although for a moment it seemed like it would. But my memories have shaded the landscape with an undertone of dread. The quality of the light, the orientation of sun over the Pacific, makes me uneasy, in the way that many of us are uneasy on blue sky days in early September. My world could easily rock and I am not seismically retrofitted.

Lucky accidents seldom happen to writers who don’t work. You will find that you may rewrite and rewrite a poem and it never seems quite right. Then a much better poem may come rather fast and you wonder why you bothered with all that work on the earlier poem. Actually, the hard work you do on one poem is put in on all poems. The hard work on the first poem is responsible for the sudden ease of the second. If you just sit around waiting for the easy ones, nothing will come. Get to work.

- Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town.

I’m going to test drive that trip, in November, and write all about so you can see whether you would like to walk in my shoes. Speaking of shoes, I already know I am going to go on a behind-the-scenes tour of the Bata Shoe Museum — yes, an entire museum dedicated to shoes! Because as it is well known, this Free Spirit likes herself a shoe.

There’s all sorts of details on how the sweepstakes works.  More as it happens.

I wasn’t looking for this, exactly, because I didn’t know what it was. But I was feeling rather odd during my last visit to Canada, a trip that took me from Vancouver to Banff to Calgary, due to various things happening in the ‘ol personal life. Odd is everywhere in this world and I do delight in finding it, but strange especially jumped out at me on this trip.

So,  onPerceptive Travel:

• Pink Critters in Calgary
• Six Definitions of Surreal
• Vancouver’s Improbable Stanley Park