Y.S. Lee's Blog, page 27

Year of the Ox

Hello friends, and Happy New Year! Are you celebrating the Lunar New Year and if so, how? At my house, we're feeling casual this year: a family dinner, a few little gifts, nothing extravagant. The Year of the Dragon will be busy and adventurous for us, I can feel it.

You probably know what your animal sign is (calculator here, if you don't), and wikipedia does a reasonable job of summarizing each animal's characteristics. Although I have only a passing curiosity in astrology, I began to wonder what zodiac animal Mary Quinn is. Although her precise date of birth is unknown, she was born in 1841, making her an Ox. (Probably. If she was born before January 25, 1841, though, she'd be a Rat.)

So if you're a believer in Chinese astrology, you'd say that Mary Quinn should be "dependable, ambitious, calm, methodical, born leader, patient, hardworking, conventional, steady, modest, logical, resolute, and tenacious. Can be stubborn, dogmatic, hot-tempered, narrow-minded, materialistic, rigid, and demanding" (description from wikipedia). Hm. I don't see "impatient" in that list of traits…

As for James Easton, he was born in the summer of 1839, making him a Pig. (Mary could have told you that the first time they met, right?) Apparently, pigs are "honest, gallant, sturdy, sociable, peace-loving, patient, loyal, hard-working, trusting, sincere, calm, understanding, thoughtful, scrupulous, passionate, and intelligent. Can be naïve, over-reliant, self-indulgent, gullible, fatalistic, and materialistic." Again, the description misses one of James's main characteristics: arrogance. Tsk, tsk.

What's your astrological sign, and how accurate do you think it is?

"Is that really you?"

Well, hello there. This week I have some new pictures to you show you and in true, immodest writerly fashion, they are of me. Posing.

This fall, Kingston Life magazine profiled eight local authors (including Steven Heighton, Helen Humphreys and Jamie Swift, so I was in awfully distinguished company), had us talk about the writing life, and commissioned photos for all of us. Talk about living the dream! It's now time for me to update my author photograph, so I asked photographer Scott Adamson for some images from the shoot and he kindly sent me a bunch. My only difficulty here is which to use. Here are my two favourites:

They were both taken at one of my favourite spots in Kingston, and the water I'm standing in is Lake Ontario. And no, the photos don't lie; it's glorious here.

Speaking of photos lying, though: with my old author photo, an acquaintance said, "Wow. You look so… good in that picture." And with the new one, someone else said, "That's a VERY flattering photo." (WordPress lacks caps big enough to do justice to her "VERY".) Both times, I was most amused.

What's the funniest/most ridiculous thing someone's said to you about a photo?

Think you love books?

The mad geniuses at Type Books (which hosted my Toronto launch for The Body at the Tower) do. The proof? This absolutely charming stop-action short, showing what books get up to at night. You'd have to be a total grinch not to love this.

Go on – tell me you're not haunted by the idea of your own books larking about in the near-dark. Mine certainly waltz, trade bookmarks, and commiserate about the recent purge.

And elsewhere on the internet, a very talented reader, Melyssa, made a painting inspired by Mary Quinn! Check it out at her Tumblr.

What are you up to this week?

My favourite things

Happy New Year, friends! I hope your NYE celebration was everything you wanted, and a fitting end to the year. I've been talking a great deal about books recently, so this week I'll write more generally about my favourite experiences of 2011. In reverse order, they are:

4. Kingston WritersFest. This was my first festival as an author, rather than as reader and fan, and it's hard to imagine a better experience. It was so well organized (I had a handler! She had extra pens slung on her hip!) and attended (great questions from younger readers) that I will be spoiled forevermore.

3. The award. The Canadian Children's Book Centre's inaugural John Spray Mystery Award, of course, which I accepted at a swanky Toronto gala in October, with a baby in the crook of my arm. Goodness. The whole thing's a bit like an opium dream, now.

2. Reading, reading, reading. I just don't feel like me if I'm not reading. (That's why I left academia: it sapped my desire to read for pleasure, and that made me intensely suspicious of myself.) Of course, I have reading slumps, and false starts, and phases when the longest thing I want to read is a New Yorker article. But I also have glorious sprints (and marathons) when I'm utterly consumed by a book, torn between the greed of reading it and the impulse to ration it out, so it lasts longer. I had so many of those amazing episodes this year, which is especially miraculous in a year I didn't expect to read much (see item below). You can also click here for some bookish highlights from the blog.

1. Our daughter (of course). My entire year was built around her: expecting, planning, hoping, dreaming, followed by the bliss, exhaustion, jubilation, anxiety, and all-transforming magic that she brought. She also gave me a gift: a break from writing that, while wonderfully enjoyable in its own lazy way, only sharpened my desire to get back to it.

What were your favourite experiences or things of 2011? What are you looking forward to in 2012?

Elsewhere on the internet, I was on Salon last week, talking about YA book-to-film adaptations: the worst ever, in my opinion, plus one I'd love to see (hi, Erin!).

And my dizzyingly accomplished friend, Jill Murphy, has been ruminating on Rumination, recently (say that 10 times fast). I gave her my $.02, but you should read Jill's blog for all the other insight and wit you'll find there.

A Picture-book Christmas

Hello, and I hope your holidays were properly blissful! We had a wonderful Christmas and today I thought I'd share with you the picture books we unwrapped as a family this year.

I'm one of those parents who squints at a toy and thinks, "Huh. That'll be a hit for all of eleven minutes," before clutching my wallet tighter. But I love, love, love buying books for my kids. This year, we chose:

Someday, by Alison McGhee and Peter H. Reynolds

Okay, this is not actually a book for children. This is a gorgeous, shamelessly sentimental book for adults, and I confess that I can't read it without crying. In fact, I first saw it when doing a bookstore visit in Toronto. There I was, standing beside my publicist, waiting to meet some booksellers, when I picked this up off the shelf. Three minutes later, I was misty-eyed and desperately hunting for a tissue. The book shows a mother imagining her infant daughter's life and all the things the child might do as she *sniff* grows up. The illustrations are very Quentin Blake, but softer, which means I'm a sucker for them, too.

This New Baby, by Teddy Jam and Virginia Johnson

"This new baby sleeps in my arms

like a moon sleeping on a cloud,

like apples falling through the rain,

like a fish swimming through the sky…"

Teddy Jam might be my favourite pseudonym. (His real identity was a secret until the death of award-winning Canadian novelist Matt Cohen in 1999, when they were revealed to be the same person.) Jam's poetry is spare and surprising, and the illustrations in this re-issued edition of the book work beautifully with Jam's free verse. It's a gorgeous and subtle book.

In the Night Kitchen, by Maurice Sendak

I'd heard of In the Night Kitchen, but never before read it. Crazy, I know! I'm so glad this was prominently displayed in my local indie bookseller's very small picture-book section; I might never have noticed it otherwise. And it is pure gold. I love that Sendak makes no attempt at logic, no effort to please a particular age bracket. It's lunatic and brilliant as a result, and we can't stop chanting, "Milk in the batter! Milk in the batter! We make cake, and nothing's the matter."

Ruby, by Colin Thompson

Another crazy one! We chose this one for the amazing illustrations, but the story (about a family of tiny, tree-root dwellers who accidentally get caught up in an Austin 7 Ruby) is slowly growing on me. At one point, the mother in the story exclaims of her impetuous son, "He hasn't even grown his second button yet!" My guess is that there's a time at which this story will seem completely reasonable, but at the moment I'm still shaking my head at the Green Virus who climbs out of the car's ashtray. Our resident 3-year-old, however, thinks it makes perfect sense. Delightful nonsense, of the Alice-in-Wonderland variety.

What books did you give and receive this holiday?

The Great Purge

In a perfect world, I would never discard books. I would save the ones I no longer wanted until just the right person walked into my life, and I could gift them the ideal book for their needs in that moment. (Maybe I'm a librarian manqué…)

In this world, however, we have six bookcases and they are crammed. There are stacks of books on the piano. There are more in the bedroom. There are yet more in the living room, and have I mentioned the study, the bathroom (repository of magazines), and the kids' room? It's time to purge.

Happily, books have more lives than cats. A few of mine will go to friends and neighbours. Most will go to my local library's Neverending Book Sale, which fundraises for the library. But still, it hurts.

I love paper books because they contain powerful memories of when I acquired them (I'll never part with the first book my husband ever gave me – Middlemarch – although I have 2 other editions of the same book), my priorities at the time (a hideous and battered 1970s paperback copy of The French Lieutenant's Woman reminds me how tight my budget was as I began my fourth year as an undergrad), and where I read them (a train ticket from Manchester to London is a bookmark that reminds me of what I was reading on our last trip to England).

Some books are easier to shed: literary theory that I held on to, because I couldn't quite believe I'd escaped the academy; books I haven't thought about in years; books I know I've read but whose content has leaked from my brain. But for the most part, getting rid of books feels like an eviction. I hope the little darlings (even the ones I disliked and disrespected) don't take it personally. And I hope they find new homes soon. But they've got to go.

How do you manage your book collections? And how do you feel about getting rid of books?

The exam of my life

Hello, all. What does December remind you of? I think of birthdays, Christmas, winter solstice, snow, darkness, and candles. Also, because I spent rather too many years at university, I think of exams. And of all the exams I've written, there's one that will always send a chill down my spine.

During my PhD program, I had to write two comprehensive exams, aka comps: they were supposed to make me a specialist in English literature in general, and Victorian literature in particular. Think they can't test you on all of English literature? You're right. But they can try, and that's even more frightening.

The process began in May, when my fellow candidates (hello, Katharine and Tanya and Sean!) and I received suggested reading lists from our professors. We read hundreds of books – fiction, non-fiction, poetry, lit crit, history. We researched ideas and movements and philosophies and clubs and quotations and obscure sidekicks and and and and… you get the picture. This would all culminate in two 4-hour exams in December.

It's fair to say that we all went a little crazy, that summer and fall. I developed a thing about colour-coded index cards. I tested pens for nib size and ink flow, and practiced handwriting as much as possible so I could write for 4 hours straight without cramping up. I made a nightmare of a timeline (17 pages!) to represent the history of English literature and refused to take it down, even though it freaked out my officemate (sorry, Katharine). I calculated how much time I should spend on each subsection of the exam. I wrote practice exams. And I read. I read like I'd never read before, and never will again: with anxiety digging its nails into my shoulders.

The first exam – the General – went smoothly. I even thought I'd passed, though actual results would take a couple of weeks. The next day, we sat down for our Specialist exams. I opened the sealed envelope and took out 3 blank booklets, for writing my answers. And… nothing. No questions.

I looked inside the envelope: still nothing.

I looked around the exam room: the other 3 had different exams and were all busily reading through their questions.

My first thought was, "They're messing with me." My second was, "This is an elaborate game. They want me to create my own questions, as well." My third, "I'm doomed."

It took me a long time to persuade the invigilator that I had thoroughly checked my envelope and that yes, I was very, very, very sure that I didn't have any questions. She then left the room for what felt like 3 days, in search of the missing questions.

I was in a blind panic. The only thing I could do (apart from weep) was to write a list of every Victorian novel I'd read in preparation for this exam. I was on page 2 when the invigilator came back with the missing exam.

It's a happy story in the end, friends. I wrote. I passed. (With distinction, even.) And I haven't written an exam since. But every December, I think about that exam, and about exam-takers everywhere. If you're in the midst of finals right now (or will be soon, in January), I'm thinking of you, too. Best of luck!

 

 

A Reader Reports: Lost in Booktopia

Hello, and welcome to the third edition of A Reader Reports! I love talking to you about recent reads; I can't believe I waited so long to make it a blog feature. I've been reading like a fiend lately (reading while breastfeeding = win!) and without a particular program – just falling into whatever book is new to me and nearby, with amazing and enlightening results.

Zsuzsi Gartner, Better Living Through Plastic Explosives

I read Zsuzsi Gartner's first short-story collection, All the Anxious Girls on Earth, in 2000 and fell for it, hard. I admired Gartner's prose style, eye for detail, and satire. I also loved her prickly relationship with Vancouver; the city is practically a character in itself. Having loved the first book so much, I was very anxious about the new one.

I should have had more faith. Gartner is better than ever – funnier, angrier, fiercer, bolder, subtler. She's still primarily a satirist, writing within a long tradition but in a slightly futuristic, quasi-fantastic, dystopian world. She's still terribly funny, too, and her vision is so dark that you flinch as much as you laugh. And yes, she still detests Vancouver. And pretension. And most people, apparently. But she now displays more compassion for the characters she scourges, and that's what makes this a finer work of art. There's real empathy here, and a sense of mourning for a world gone terribly, probably irredeemably, wrong.

Andrea Levy, The Long Song

One reason I resist e-readers is because they deny me one of my favourite habits: browsing other people's bookshelves. I love, love, love peering into people's brains via their reading habits, as well as how and where they keep their books. I spotted this one on top of a small pile in my parents' living room. I'd never heard of it, although clearly I should have. It's an absolutely first-rate historical novel about Miss July, a house slave on a sugar plantation in early nineteenth-century Jamaica. Beautifully written, bursting with respectful and vivid dialect, and funny. You might not see much room for humour in life under slavery, but Levy is persuasive on this subject. Life, no matter how brutal, is tricky and surprising and leaves room for humour if you're the sort of person to see it. She clearly is, and the result is utterly memorable.

Jill Paton Walsh, The Attenbury Emeralds

You may already know how much I adore the detective fiction of Dorothy L. Sayers and especially her sleuth, Peter Wimsey. If you haven't had the pleasure of reading Gaudy Night, please do so as soon as possible. I dream of writing (but will never manage) a mystery novel as good, or a romantic couple with the depth and heart of Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane. This knowledge doesn't stop me from reading and re-reading Sayers with utter pleasure.

All Sayers fans feel the same way, so Jill Paton Walsh risks life and reputation in writing a continuation of their story. The mystery here is beside the point; all really want to know is What Happened Next with Peter and Harriet. And this shows: while the mystery is twisty and fairly clever, its structure is inherently broken-backed and the dénouement should have been stronger. But the life stuff – the ongoing romance, the family story – is really, really good. Paton Walsh's research into the post-war period feels authentic and she creates a complex and believable life for Peter (the younger son of a duke, and thus a central part in a class system that's beginning to feel its irrelevance), Harriet (his detective-novelist, bluestocking wife), and their family. It's a satisfying book when you're reading for Peter-and-Harriet and using the mystery as a pacing device. This sounds like faint praise (or passive-aggressive criticism), but it's a significant achievement and Paton Walsh's writing is clean and elegant in its homage to Sayers, especially when giving voice to the other members of the Wimsey family.

Miriam Toews, The Flying Troutmans

This novel really shouldn't work: it's a self-consciously zany, neurotic, roadtripping, coming-of-age saga about a family with serious mental health issues. It's largely, deliberately, plotless. It's written almost entirely in dialogue. It ends with redemption. And it's absolutely fantastic.

Miriam Toews has a brilliant ear, an enormous amount of sympathy for misfits, and a fine understanding of the endless difficulties of being a weird kid. The Flying Troutmans is like a perfect rebuttal, or a reverse-engineered recipe: take all the groan-inducing clichés of CanLit. Add a fiercely self-conscious wit. And suddenly, you have a completely addictive firecracker of a novel. (In fact, between them, Miriam Toews and Zsuzsi Gartner offer a brilliant and convincing refutation of all that people complain of in Canadian literature.) This was SO good, you guys.

Robert van Gulik, The Chinese Maze Murders

Oh, I'm ambivalent about this one. Robert van Gulik was a diplomat and scholar of ancient Chinese detective fiction. He knew far more about the Chinese tradition of murder-mysteries than I ever will. His aim in writing (this novel is part of a series featuring his sleuth, Justice Dee) was to share that tradition with contemporary Western readers, and in this he partly succeeds: I learned some interesting details about justice and daily life during the Ming Dynasty, and enjoyed van Gulik's period-style illustrations.

But even now, I'm not sure how much of what I disliked was due to the genre/tradition, and how much was van Gulik's own contribution. The narrative style is mannered and stilted, the characters are entirely two-dimensional, and most of the twists in the plot were given away in the jacket copy! The one element that I know was van Gulik's idea (the identity & motivation of the last murderer) is very much a sensationalist cliché of his time (the 1950s), which I can't help reading with a modern sensibility. Finally, this edition (published by the University of Chicago Press, which really ought to do better) also contains a number of distracting typos. Still, it has novelty value and while I wouldn't read another Judge Dee mystery, I appreciated learning a little about a different tradition of detective fiction.

How about you, friends? What have you been reading?

This is when it feels real

Hello, friends. Look at what turned up at my house recently!

Yes, these are ARCs of The Traitor in the Tunnel (publishing February '12). That gorgeous cover is even better in real life (mitigated only by the knowledge that the finished copies will be even more stunning). As for its contents…

It's a curious feeling, holding the book in my hands. You might expect that after having written, rewritten, and edited it, and having been edited, line-edited, copy-edited, and proofread, that it might feel, um, somewhat familiar (resorting to understatement). And it's true: there are parts of it I've unintentionally commited to memory.

But seeing it bound is astonishing because it also distances me from the production of the book. After all, this is the part I know nothing about. It becomes less my book, and more like a strange and staggering miracle. The cover is lovely and intriguing and slightly nostalgic (because I have, after all, seen it before). And then I flip open the pages and the experience becomes terrifying because it feels like looking into part of my brain. From the outside.

It's at this moment that the panic sets in. I'm about to send this out into the world? Without anyone to protect it? Or even an explanatory preface?

This is far from rational, of course. I know, at some level, that this is a strong book. Actually, I think it's the best of the three Agency novels so far. But still. Still. This is the curious push-pull of the almost-published moment, for me.

Is it like this for you, fellow authors? And how about you, aspiring writers and fellow bloggers and readers? How do you feel when you're about to send something Out There?

Until tomorrow

Hi, friends. Please forgive today's blogging fail and join me tomorrow, when I'll have ARCs of The Traitor in the Tunnel to show you. Woo!