Reading Roundup

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Psychic Fair are releasing our first recording tomorrow night at Gus' Pub. It's a cassette called Bees on Ice — eight songs and a download code for five bucks. Or you can just buy the download for the same five bucks on Bandcamp. I think the album sounds heavy and great, and I'm really looking forward to the show. Also on the bill are first-timers Sledge and art-lounge duo Bad PI. Maybe one other band. Come and check it out if you can.

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I had lots of time off over the Christmas holidays to read like a maniac. The pile of books I'd been in the middle of was starting to grow, and I'd promised myself I wouldn't pick up anything new till I finished what I'd started. That promise has mostly been kept, I'm happy to report.

The first thing to go was also the most recently begun. I'd borrowed Lynda Barry's Cruddy from Amber — who said it was her favourite book when she was in junior high school — and basically devoured it. The novel reads kind of like young-adult fiction, and the narrator/protagonist is a teenager, but it's so dark that I'm not really sure it's meant to be read by young adults. The levels of extreme rural poverty and amorality depicted make Deliverance look like an issue of Country Living. Any sentence randomly chosen is guaranteed to contain some combination of damage, disease, depravity, drugs, obscenities, literal filth, meat processing, or murder. It's really quite nauseating. It's also full of the pitch-perfect tragic-youth voice I've always loved in Barry's comic strips, and funny as hell.

Lynn Coady's latest short story collection, Hell Going, was next, as it was another borrow. Coady won the Giller Prize for this one, and it's easy to see why. The language is economical, and the narrative voice is audible and familiar. The characters are compellingly flawed and realistically complex. The plots are full of surprise twists, resolving gracefully and leaving lots of unanswered questions. I always seem to avoid CanLit, but I'll definitely be putting more Lynn Coady on the To Be Enjoyed list.

Then there was some non-fiction. If You're Lucky, Your Heart Will Break is a rumination on some of the principles of Zen Buddhism and its practice in real life by James Ishmael Ford. It was in the cast-off box at work, and I'm really glad I picked it up. Maybe it's because he's a Unitarian minister, but I found myself connecting with this guy's views big time. He has a healthy skepticism of dogma and borrows liberally from the beliefs and practices of other religious traditions, always looking for the kernel of truth that can be better viewed from multiple angles. This is pure conjecture, but I feel like Ford would never, for example, use the phrase, "the true dharma." I hear and read that one a lot lately, and it becomes more unsavoury to me every time.

Waging Heavy Peace was the last to go. Neil Young's memoirs are casually written in short, blog-like chunks of whatever he happens to be thinking about, which makes for a fun read. The book goes on a little long and gets sort of repetitive towards the end, which is why I hadn't finished it. But still, great to get some insight into how Young's mind works and to hear his voice on the page, whether you'd typically be interested in the subject at hand or not. The main themes that keep coming up are:

1. Neil has known and worked with lots of amazing, beautiful people, for which he is eternally grateful.
2. His family is super important to him.
3. His career has included lots of hilarious adventures, often involving drugs and/or cars.
4. Cars are awesome, but should be made to run in sustainable ways, which he plans to prove is possible.
5. Music is awesome, but should be delivered in non-crappy-sounding formats, which he plans to prove is possible.
6. Crazy Horse are awesome in some kind of unexplainable, mystical way.
7. The creative process can never be pinned down, but Neil has learned some rules of thumb along the way.
8. He hopes that quitting drugs and alcohol has not permanently cut off his connection to the songwriting muse.

As do we all. But thanks, in the meantime, for a good read.

Having done so much finishing-off, I immediately started in on a new batch of material. Right now I'm in the middle of Morrissey's Autobiography, which Alison gave me for Christmas, and George Saunders' amazing short story collection Tenth of December. I also picked up a new book co-authored by Douglas Hofstadter and a French psychologist, called Surfaces and Essences, on the central role analogy plays in all cognition. Seems super nerdy so far, but I've barely made a dent in it. I'll keep you posted as things progress.