Books at mid-year (2026)

As anticipated, I am certainly reading less now that I am almost never on transit.  The spring was mostly taken up with Nabokov (Ada and then Transparent Things).  On a trip out to Halifax, I started Dickens's American Notes (and made sure to read the parts where he lands in Halifax (and might well have been in a ship wreck, which would have really shaken up British literature) and later on travelled up to Toronto and Montreal!) though it took me a while to finish it up.  I also decided to abandon Hulme's The Bone People. 

I then read Steinbeck's Cannery Row (and am reserving Sweet Thursday for the fall).  For Book Club, I read Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman (in a single day!).  I made it through Thammavongsa's story collection How to Pronounce Knife fairly quickly.  I was going to read her short novel Pick a Colour, but we are reading that for Book Club in the fall, so I might as well read it later, so it will be fresh.  I was struggling with Ariel Dorfman's The Last Song of Manuel Sendero, finding it so slow and repetitive and also quite intentionally obscure.  I finally abandoned it.  Given that I abandoned another Dorfman book (about an obnoxious bike messenger!), and I have zero interest in ever watching or reading Death and the Maiden, it's safe to say he just isn't for me.  I am more interested than ever in rereading Fuentes's Christopher Unborn, really hoping that it still holds up for me.

I read quite a few poetry collections in May and June, mostly by Jennifer LoveGrove and Laurie Graham (Rove and Settler Education and Calling It Back to Me), finding that I liked LoveGrove's first and second collections (The Dagger Between Her Teeth and I Should Have Never Have Fired the Sentinel) a bit better than her later ones, though I did like The Tinder Sonnets a bit more than I expected, and I would have been ok picking up a copy at the Tranzac reading (if she had had a square on her).   I didn't care much for Joshua Weiner's The World's Room, though there was a poem at the end about air travel that I might chuck into the travel anthology.  Also, there was a pretty good poem (or section of a poem) about a shipwreck in Gbenga Adesina's Death Does Not End at the Sea.

 

I also read a lot of graphic novels (the entire Giant Days series), severely cutting into my normal reading time.  And of course, Fringe took up almost all the remaining time.

At any rate, I somehow ended up with a copy of The World Goes On by László Krasznahorkai from the library.  I think I am somewhat intrigued by his War & War, but this was easier to request.  It turns out that I brought it along with me on the trip to Stratford.  I also was midway through Offill's Weather, and I also brought along Barry Kennedy's All That Monk Business, which is a quirky novel set in Vancouver's Downtown East Side.  It does have a cool cover.  I can't remember where I picked this up, though most likely either at a Little Free Library or a library book sale.

I alternated through all three books on the bus ride in and when we had some downtime between the plays.  I finished Weather first.  It is a very fast read, with short paragraphs outlining this woman and how she lets caring for her f'ed up brother overwhelm her life to the point where her husband takes off for a while with their child.  There is also a lot of discussion on how to keep moving forward when the future seems somewhat pointless, i.e. the climate crisis will wipe out civilization.  Definitely a novel that is in tune with the gesalt.  I'll probably get around to reading her Department of Speculation, which is an earlier novel in the same vein.

I made a big dent in The World Goes On, finishing it a few days after we got back.  I didn't like this much at all, and I probably would have dropped it, except I didn't have lots of other options on the bus(!), and I had so recently dropped the Dorfman.  I will borrow War & War later to see if it lives up to the hype, but will not give it nearly as much of a chance.

I'm sort of torn on All That Monk Business.  I don't care much for the main character, Buddy Monk, and I don't really find any of the characters plausible.  It's taken 100 pages (a third of the novel) to finally come to the point where Monk's father's will is revealed.  It's not clear if this is going to set off a frantic hunt a la It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World or go in an entirely different direction.  I'm mostly plugging along because it does remind me of my time in Vancouver, not that I spent much time at all on Hastings when I could avoid it.  

I am very close to wrapping up Coupland's Microserfs, and the current plan it to bring it along next weekend and give it to my brother, who is in the tech industry.  And I am probably going to finish Narayan's The Vendor of Sweets in a day or two.  I'm glad that this isn't another repeat of Swami and His Friends in the sense that the boy who decides to abandon his studies carves out another path, but I'm not liking this as much as some of his earlier novels.

The current plan for next weekend is to bring along Thrity Umrigar's The Space Between Us and Chandler Klang Smith's The Sky Is Yours, both of which I should be able to leave behind, assuming I get through them on the trip.

 

After this, it will probably be Chakraborty's The Adventures of Amina Al-Sirafi (having borrowed this from the library), McCullers's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Marcial Gala's Call Me Cassandra, Thien's The Book of Records, Woolf's Night and Day, Harvey's Orbital, O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find and Amis's The Information.  Oh, and very likely rereading The Odyssey, almost certainly sticking with Lattimore.

In the late fall/winter, I am considering Murdoch's Under the Net, Mavis's Montreal Stories, Vanderhaeghe's My Present Age, William Maxwell's So Long, See You Tomorrow, Woolf's To the Lighthouse and The Waves, Lamming's The Pleasures of Exile, Forster's Howard's End, Tibor Fischer's Voyage to the End of the Room, Nabokov's Pale Fire and then Martel's Son of Nobody.

As ever, simply too much to read and not enough time... 

Edit (7/27): After going through Queen Books, I added an awful lot of poetry books to my TPL hold list, so I will probably end up with another long diversion through poetry (including Lattimore's Odyssey) before I get back to novels.  I also have become a bit obsessed with The Secret Life of Books podcast, though I think I will draw the line at donating/subscribing in order to join their book club.  They are working their way through Dickens's Bleak House at the moment, and I just don't have the mental energy to return to this opus at this moment.  Maybe if the book club sessions are archived, it is something I would consider next year...  One nice thing is that they largely stick to the classics (which I have already read).  I think the only books I need to read before listening to these episodes are Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, Henry James's Portrait of a Lady and Dickens's David Copperfield.  Interestingly, they haven't gotten to Ellison's Invisible Man yet, and it seems unlikely they will cover Joyce's Ulysses directly (though it was discussed in brief in the legacy of the Odyssey episode), as Sophie Gee is firmly in Virginia Woolf's camp and doesn't care for Joyce much.

Rereading the Odyssey

I guess it is somewhat natural, but everyone is talking about The Odyssey nowadays.  I haven't booked a ticket yet to see Nolan's Odyssey yet, but I will fairly soon.  Interestingly, Market Square is showing it, but I want to try to see it at an IMAX theatre, at the very least, though I am not going to fly to Regina or wherever to see it in Super IMAX.  There are even podcasts dedicated to the Odyssey this summer (Secret Life of Books Eps. 154-158, in particular), as well as plenty of articles talking about what Nolan left out (the bed riddle and almost all of the sex with Circe and especially Calypso) or added, most notably the ending.  There are in fact some scraps of legends talking about what happened to Odysseus post-Ithaca, so it isn't as if this ending was completely tacked on, but it certainly isn't what is in the Odyssey itself.  His final voyage is discussed in passing in Dante and is actually the focus of Tennyson's Ulysses.  I suspect I will overall enjoy it, though I've heard parts are extra loud and then there are long stretches with people whispering.  I honestly wonder why no one can seem to convince him that his audience would actually grow more if he didn't tinker with the sound balance so much.  I will not go to see Tenet again for this very reason...

I'm debating rereading The Odyssey or at least large chunks of it before I go off to the movie, along with many, many others.  (There is even a piece on how bookstores can't keep up with demand for The Odyssey, The Iliad and other classics (paywalled unfortunately).)  I recall that back in 2019 I read the Fitzgerald and Lattimore translations of both The Iliad and The Odyssey back to back, coming down firmly in favour of Lattimore, and fortunately I still have my copies of Lattimore's Homer.  I've only read a very few snatches of the Wilson and Mendelsohn translations.  I'll dig a bit deeper, but am almost certain I will come back to Lattimore as the best translation for what I am looking for in Homer.  (As a bit of a follow-up to this post, I did end up getting Musa's Portable Dante, and I really ought to read that fairly soon, alternating with Ciardi's translations.  I even have Longfellow's translation of Dante!  I don't think anyone finds that a particularly good translation, but it has all of Dore's illustrations, which makes it worth perusing as well.)

Interestingly, Mendelsohn has a memoir or fictionalized memoir (An Odyssey: A Father, a Son and an Epic) about his father sitting in on his class about the Odyssey and their bonds growing stronger through exploring the text.  This sort of sounds like what Night Journey at this year's Toronto Fringe was going for, though it was ultimate pretty disappointing.  

I had high hopes for this, but they were dashed.  It's hard to say just what went wrong, though pretty much every critic agreed that the social media influencer who comes in at the very end and tries to stir up trouble was a huge mis-step.  This wasn't even remotely believable.  I would say that it suffers the most from the playwright not actually writing about anything he knows about personally (academic politics) so filled in the gaps from what he pulled from diverse headlines over the years.  It wasn't really clear whether this was all taking place at a university or a college (which in Canada are basically community colleges).  

The professor clearly operates as if he is in a classics department in a university, and the rich heir would never be sent to a college (his character was not remotely believable, which was another major problem).  However, the bizarre under-resourcing, the other three students and the way that the board of regents tried to bend over backwards to pacify a loony social media agitator all reek of college.  Aside from the complete lack of insight into how the college politics would play out, the play just didn't dive into the poem itself enough and show how wrestling with the thorny issues in the poem changed the students' lives.  Most of the character growth (generally not believable) came through interactions that had nothing to do with the source material itself.  And the staging was just ridiculous with so many short, unlinked scenes, making this drag on for too long.  So this really requires a complete rethinking and rewriting.  It was such a missed opportunity.

Slow Weekend

While two and three weekends ago were completely stuffed with Fringe activities, and last weekend was Stratford and next weekend is the funeral in Iowa, I actually don't have all that much on the calendar for this weekend.  I think it is likely going to rain, but it doesn't actually look like it will at the moment.  Maybe it will wait until tomorrow.

Friday evening I had some spare time, as there really wasn't anything going on that caught my eye at the Rex or Hirut.  As the weather was nice, I decided I should hit the AGO again to simplify Sat. afternoon if it was raining hard.  I passed through the David Blackwell again quickly, as that is closing soon.  Then saw the Enda Tacon exhibit and the Impressionist paintings on loan from Dallas.  (The Monet room was still busy but not as packed as before.)  I even had time to go into the Infinity Room again.

I managed to get this one work task done pretty quickly, using my "unauthorized" copy of SPSS, since work still can't get around to getting my license activated, so I am using a home version.  I still haven't finished my time sheet, but that is a tonight problem...  (I have a pretty major CRA thing to deal with as well, but that is also going to have to wait.)

I was up fairly early this morning cleaning up some computer files.  I have tried a couple of times to get Disney+ working on Roku again but am pretty close to giving up, esp. as Roku aggressively discourages people from contacting them.  What a completely shit company/service provider they are.

I went back to bed for a much needed nap (and much longer than I expected) when I was woken by the house foundations shaking due to Ontario Line construction nearby.  I really am going to have to find that number to force them to do an inspection and take some photos, so they will pay for the damages if the house really does crumble due to their digging and tunnelling.  Sigh.  One more thing I really don't want to have to deal with...

I'm about to go off to the gym.  I think after this I will briefly hit the galleries in Yorkville and 401 Richmond, then come back.  Depending on how I feel and if it has started raining, I might try to weed the front yard which badly needs it.

Sunday, I plan to go swimming at noon, and then meet a friend at Video Cab to see Our Town.  I decided to hold off on getting tickets to see Herbie Hancock at Massey Hall.  There are still quite a few left, the last time I checked, so I'll try to get rush tickets and see what those cost.  So not exactly a restful weekend, but certainly less crammed than usual...

Edit: I ended up dawdling for so long that I went downtown first.  I ate (too much) at an Indian buffet, then hit 401 Richmond and Yorkville.  I'll probably post a few pictures of things I stumbled across shortly.  Then I went to the gym and did groceries.  I'm pretty close to winding down for the day, but I think I'll try to do a bit of weeding in the front yard, so quite an inversion of the way I thought the day would go. 

Edit (7/27): Sunday did go more or less as planned.  I got to Jimmie Simpson just after noon.  The fast lanes were basically empty.  I got my swimming in, wrapping up at 1.  Then did a bit of shopping and window shopping on Queen St.  Saw Our Town with my friend and hung out at a coffee shop afterwards.  I actually managed to clean up the front yard a fair bit.  The main difference was that Massey Hall didn't have any reasonable rush tickets for Herbie Hancock, so I passed on seeing him and went to see Mike Murley at the Rex instead (for $20 instead of $100+).  This does decrease the likelihood that I go back to the Rex tonight, however.

Life Interlude

I was planning on either writing about our recent trip to Stratford (quite fun, even though the plays were certainly on the depressing side!) or the massive Fringe catch-up post.  However, as we were grabbing food at Union Station after the bus ride back in from Stratford, my wife said that my cousin had messaged her and said that the funeral arrangements were underway.  I was very sad, but not totally surprised.  Then I had a second to think about it and wondered why my cousin would be involved at all.  I took another look at the message and realized that it was my other cousin, Adam, and not my step-brother who had just passed away.  This was certainly a shock to me, even though he had not been taking care of himself.  And also was a fairly heavy drinker.  I tried to estimate his age and decided he was about 48, though when the obit came out, it turned out he was only 46!

Very very sad.  I certainly wasn't close at all to him, and slightly closer to my other cousin, but in small families, you try to go to weddings and funerals, so I started looking into it.  At first, I thought it would be cheaper to break the flight up and buy tickets on Porter to Chicago and then on United or Southwest from Chicago to Moline (in the Quad Cities), but I was reading things wrong and the price was completely jacked up.  (My friend in Chicago tells me that this is Lollapalooza, which I had no idea was even still running, so that's probably why the prices are so high!)  It ended up being cheaper to do it all on United.  What I finally worked out was flying from Toronto to Chicago to Moline next Friday.  The visitation and memorial service and everything will be Sat., and we'll spend time with what's left of the family.  My brother has work trips that he can't get out of, so he's going to try to rearrange things so he can make most of the service and then head back to the airport to go on to his next destination!

I'll leave pretty early on Sunday, fly into Chicago, but then the Chicago to Toronto leg will be in the evening, so I'll have pretty much the whole day in Chicago.  I will say that it is possible if Trump had started his latest ravings about Canada and that the wildfires are our fault and how ungrateful we are and that he is going to try to put more tariffs on our goods and bring us to our knees, I would have told them, sorry I just can't justify going down under these conditions.  (And indeed, if my step-brother passes away in the next month or two, it will be an even tough decision to go down.)  However, as long as I am going, I might as well do something in Chicago to make the trip worthwhile.  I plan on checking out the Art Institute for a few hours and then the MCA and meet a friend for dinner.  I had wondered about theatre, and while there is The Importance of Being Earnest playing, it is in Oak Park, which is a bit of a trek.  And for some odd reason, Tuta is doing Crime and Punishment, but not at all on that one weekend!  The most interesting was Stoppard's Leopoldstadt.  However, it was in Glencoe(!), so I would have to convince my friend to go.  And then I would have to stay over and leave Monday morning.  If it had been in downtown Chicago and it really only involved/inconvenienced me, I probably would have done it.  (My friend is a theatre buff but not quite to the same degree as me and she figured she needed her sleep more...)  If I hadn't managed to see it in New York (after it didn't turn up in Toronto), then I would probably have gone ahead and done it, but I don't have to see it again.  Anyway, I'll get more than enough museums in during my one day in Chicago.

Starting to work through the books I'll take on the trip, trying to prioritize books I can read and leave behind.  I actually should be finished with Coupland's Microserfs by then, and I'll try to pass that along to my brother.  So that's what's on the agenda for next weekend. 

Edit: I had definitely thought about shipping some things to my friend, which I did on my last visit.  It turns out that despite there being a pretty good sale at Radiance this week (to celebrate launching their US site) where the prices aren't too bad, shipping to Canada still sucks.  So I was about to ship a copy of Eiichi Kudo's Yokohama BJ Blues to my friend in Chicago, but it turns out that Robarts has it, and I just needed to search on Kudō instead of Kudo.  Then I took a look at Amazon.com and sure enough they had a pretty decent sale on Blu-rays, including Huston's The Dead.  In this case, shipping to Canada was not so different from shipping to Chicago, so I did that and won't have to impose on my friend at all, which is certainly for the best.  Also, the Rishi Dastidar book I tried to buy through Amazon (Cherry Blossom at Nightbreak) -- but was blocked by file format issues -- is on order at Robarts.  It may take a while for it to end up in the system, but it should get there eventually, which is terrific, as I don't imagine I would read this more than once, making a library copy ideal.

Edit (7/24): I had completely forgotten that I have the following Monday off, so I could have seen the play Sunday evening, stayed over and left at some completely reasonable time on Monday (instead of 6 am).  And while that is sorely tempting, the fact that I would need to convince my friend to go (is Glencoe is way off the beaten path) and also to then let me stay overnight just makes this a bit too stressful, even before trying to rearrange the flight at this point, so I will just let it go, and see if Mirvish ever does manage to bring Leopoldstadt to Toronto.

World on Fire

I was going to write about something else, but this merits its own post.  The skies over Toronto were dull orange yesterday, and most of the day it was almost like going through a partial eclipse.  It was really hard to focus, as it felt like early evening for pretty much the entire working day.

I probably shouldn't have biked in, but I did, and have some shots I took along the way.

 

 

The CN Tower is barely visible between a few buildings in the third picture.  I didn't apply any special filter to the shots, and indeed I think the camera did amp up the orange a bit, but it looked pretty much like this, especially this fourth shot.

My son was going to join me at the Jazz Bistro to see Nathan Tran but decided it made more sense to stay home, and I decided it wasn't a great idea to come home and turn right around and go back out in this, so I worked another hour, ate at Ginger and then went over to the Jazz Bistro.  I only stayed for the first set. 

What is so incredibly dispiriting is that we are almost at the point where even the climate change deniers can no longer deny things are badly out of whack, but there is still no push to make any meaningful change and most countries, esp. in North America, are badly off track and in fact going in reverse when it comes to implementing policies that would improve matters.  An entire generation betrayed by the current political leadership, including Carney.  It does seem to me that western democracy (and the underlying institutions that so clearly favour the weathy and powerful) has completely failed this test.  I really don't see any reason for hope at all.

Life Away from Fringe

The Toronto Fringe wrapped up Sun.  I never did get around to posting my Fringe schedule, so I will do it retrospectively at some point with comments on what I saw.  I would say I enjoyed pretty much everything I saw with one unfortunate exception.  I will also post a few thoughts on my show and how things went and what I might do differently the next time.  (Each time at Fringe you learn something new...)  But I'll just write down some non-Fringe thoughts for now.

My son came down from Ottawa (admittedly in order to see my Fringe play).  He was scheduled to leave tomorrow, but with the extreme heat, Via is saying that the trains will have multi-hour delays(!), so it looks like he will stay until Thurs. or maybe even Friday.  It has been quite hot here.  Last week wasn't so bad, but the first week of Fringe there was a massive heat wave.  Which is back now.  I'm still planning on biking to work tomorrow, but will try to set up before the worst of the heat, and then perhaps I'll go swimming on the way home, which might help a bit.

I haven't done too much other than Fringe for the past two weeks.  I had wanted to see Silent Running over at the Paradise.  But it overlapped with Galen's Grocer: the Musical, which was amusing but quite goofy, and Night Journey, so I really couldn't make it.  I also had thought very seriously about catching the first set of Kirk MacDonald with Neil Swainson at the Rex.  This is very similar to the group that I saw at the Jazz Bistro, though Neil wasn't sitting in.  In the end, my wife and son went to an Indian restaurant (after coming back from You Choose), and then I biked off to see 2076 at Sweet Action Theatre.  While I would have enjoyed the set, 2076 was pretty good, and I wouldn't really wanted to have missed it.  I'll probably be going to the Jazz Bistro once or even twice this week, so it's not like I won't get my jazz fix in.

That day I also took them to the AGO (in between my Fringe show and You Choose), so that was at least something different.  The current exhibition is Impressionist paintings on loan from Dallas.  The exhibition runs through mid Oct., so I'll go back several times.  The room with the two Monet's was definitely the most popular, and it was very hard to see the paintings at all.  Here's one of them:

Claude Monet, The Water Lily Pond (Clouds), 1903

My favourite was probably this painting by Pissarro:

Camille Pissarro, The Fish Market, Dieppe: Grey Weather, Morning, 1902

I really have not been able to keep up with my reading.  I did read Sayaka Murata's Convenience Store Woman (in the course of a single day!) for Book Club, but didn't care for it very much.

I am midway through Copland's Microserfs, and this is a bit more to my taste.  It explores a world that I remember, even though I was never particularly into coding in the late 80s or 90s and mostly just used computers for course work.  I'm pretty sure I never took a course in computer science or computer engineering, though by the late 90s I was using quite specialized programs for work (and indeed the need to move back and forth between work and home computers led me away from Macs in the late 90s, as they were not compatible with these programs).

I finally gave up on Dorfman's The Last Song of Manuel Sendero.  It just felt so incredibly static with all these unborn babies trying not to be born to stick it to the (Chilean) dictatorship, but nothing happened at all even as I skipped ahead.  (In some ways, Midnight's Children also deals with a large cadre of children, albeit those that were born, but then these children get up to all kinds of things in the real world.)  Apparently, there is this whole meta-fictional thing going where thousands of years in the future, they are trying to uncover the truth about the events in the book (not unlike what happens in Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play) but either I didn't reach that stage or more likely I didn't understand what Dorfman was trying to convey.  I just found it all intentionally obscure, and I generally can't bear books like that.  My recollection is that Fuentes's Christopher Unborn, which came out a couple of years before Manuel Sendero, is far more interesting and engaging.  I'd like to try to read it this year, though I am certainly worried that I won't like it nearly as much this time around.

I have started Jennifer Offill's Weather, and this is far more to my taste, so I plan to read this and a few other short books that I am fairly sure I will like, including Narayan's The Vendor of Sweets and perhaps rereading Iris Murdoch's Under the Net and perhaps Denis Johnson's Train Dreams (which I am less sure I will like, but it is quite short whenever I can actually get it from the library) to try to get back into my reading habits.  I guess that is enough for now, as I do need to get back to work.  My next posts will probably be those Fringe round-up posts, but I definitely don't have time to tackle them now.
 

A (Nearly) Sold Out Show!

Yesterday afternoon was the best ticket sales so far.  I knew it was going to be a big crowd, but I was expecting around 75 people.  In the end, with a few last walk-ups, we had 101!  

Here we see people actually wrapping around the corner, waiting to get in!

Alumnae is one of the bigger theatres, seating 123 (or so), so it wasn't sold out, but very close.

It was a solid show, though we had some problem with the sound cue between scene 1 and 2, and then a rushed entrance midway through scene 2.  But people seemed to get the jokes and generally had a good time.

I didn't hang out with the actors this time around, but I talked briefly to the Fringe staff (one of whom wants to do more producing of her own, so we may connect) and then biked up to Tarragon to see You Choose (again).

I haven't had much luck passing out postcards at Soulpepper, but I have always had better luck at Tarragon, and tonight was no exception.  In fact, as I was passing out the cards, one guy said that he didn't need one, he had seen the show.  I asked if he had liked it, and he said yes.  Then I passed out the postcard to the next person, and he said to her that it was a fun show.  So that's amazing, and that's exactly the word of mouth we need for a strong second week.

In fact, sales for this second week of Fringe are pretty good, with the exception of tonight, where sales are on the low side (20) but I'm expecting some late sales and walk ups.  I think every show after tonight is at least 30 and usually 40 or more, so we should have a strong second week to close out Fringe.  As ever, more info and a link to buy tickets to see the show yourself can be found here.

I've kind of personally hit a wall, and am a little tired of all the hustling.  I wouldn't say I really want Fringe to be over, but I don't want to feel responsible for stirring up more ticket sales (or trying to break even, a more or less impossible task) or if anything goes wrong at one of the shows.  I'd rather just focus on the shows I have booked to see and let everything else go for now...