I can't recall if I mentioned that I was at a concert (something that Tapestry Orchestra was putting on) and I was next to a young woman reading an interesting looking book. I finally figured out that she was reading Desai's The Inheritance of Loss. I had Nabokov's Ada with me. After the concert we talked just a bit about both authors. I mentioned that Desai had just been in town for TIFA, and she was disappointed to have missed out on that. I think I was planning on mentioning Reva's Endling to her, but we went our separate ways before I could do that.
I had an opportunity to plug the book another time, however. I was coming back from rehearsal on Sunday and stopped off at the burrito place near the Spadina TTC stop. A young woman was behind the counter, who I hadn't seen before, not that I go in there all that often. She certainly looked like she might have been a UT student, though hard to say. I was reading some of Jennifer LoveGrove's poetry. She asked me what the book was about, and I said it was poetry, so it wasn't really about anything or maybe it was about everything. She then asked if I read a lot, and I said I was a heavy reader since I was a child, and that I probably had read a couple of thousand books (which I think is true, not that I have ever tried to count). She then asked what was my favourite, and I said that was an impossible question and she agreed. I did recommend Reva's Endling, but she didn't seem too sold on it (perhaps the bit about the mail order brides or she just doesn't like stories about the war). Then I said she should read Atwood's Cat's Eye, and that interested her a lot more. She said she had been reading Dostoevsky, starting with White Nights, which was such an internet thing a few months (years?) back. Impressively, she had pushed on and read Crime and Punishment and something else. I told her she should read Demons, which was an underrated masterpiece.* She said she would check that out too. So this was all pretty amusing, and definitely one of the more interesting literary conversations I've had outside of a book club.
It was particularly a bit amusing how she kept the conversation going, but it can only have been because she was a bit bored and really liked to talk about reading. I have to go back close to 30 years before I can recall anyone flirting with me over books. It was at the Seattle hostel when a young woman said that reading a book in a semi-public place like the dining area of a hostel was like a flame to a moth. I have no idea what I was reading at that time. She said that she just adored the work of John Fante. (Years and years later, I read most of Fante's work but was left fairly cold...)
Maybe for my planning epic, I do have a young female employee of some sort who keeps trying to flirt (though on-going discussion of books) with a somewhat oblivious male planner. In addition to being a bit oblivious and not really thinking a woman would be all that into him, he also has been "trained" to think that retail employees 1) don't really want to be hassled and asked out at work (which is overwhelmingly true) and 2) that retail employees are always extra nice to customers in order to get larger tips (also true), which indeed makes it a challenge for a retail worker who truly is trying to flirt with a customer. This could be an interesting if low-key side plot. Let me think more upon it.
At any rate, I wonder if I will see the same worker if I stop by after rehearsal next week. In case she asks again about the best book I've ever read, I could prepare by going through this list, which is probably the equivalent of my all-time favourite books, though probably a list that needs a bit of revisiting, as I would definitely drop Powers's Morte d'Urban and possibly Beckett's Waiting for Godot...
* From my review, I see that I was really, really big on Demons 12(!!!) years ago. I suspect I was particularly primed to be reading Demons back then as I had see Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia back in April and then read quite a few Russian novels and even Herzen's memoirs. Looking over the list, it is pretty astonishing even for me! All this to say that I wonder if I would feel quite so positively towards Demons if I read it today (and should I continue to promote it so highly). I would hope so, and I would love to find the time to read it again in the near future, though that seems a bit unlikely.
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