Best Concerts of 2022

There was such a return to concert activity, that I found that quite often there were very interesting concerts occurring on the same day.  What a dilemma.

These are some of the highlights for me:

Feb.:

Angela Hewitt plays Bach & Mozart (TSO)

April:
Dvořák's New World Symphony (TSO)

Amici Schubert's Octet

The Magnetic Fields (Queen Elizabeth Theatre) (a solid setlist, though I would have loved to have heard "God Wants Us to Wait" and "'92 Weird Diseases")

(Joshua) Redman · (Christian) McBride · (Brian) Blade: A MoodSwing Reunion (Actually Brad Mehldau was ill and didn't make the gig, but it was still a great show)

May:
Tafelmusik: Bach's Brandenburg Concertos (presented in Koerner Hall for a change)

Joshua Bell (TSO)

June:
Celebrating R. Murray Schafer (a free concert presented by Soundstreams at Grace Church-on-the-Hill)

The Watchmen w/ Skye Wallace as the opening act (Lee's Palace)

July:
Orford String Quartet performing Antonín Dvořák: “American” String Quartet in F 

Mendelssohn's Octet at TO Summer Music Festival

Sarah McLachlan (Budweiser Stage)

August:
Spoon & Interpol & Metric (Budweiser Stage) (The Spoon lead singer says the next time through Toronto will be a real show not just as an opening act, so I'll keep my eyes open for that.)

Barenaked Ladies & The Ginblossoms & Toad the Wet Sprocket (Budweiser Stage)  (Apparently, Kim Mitchell joined them for the Toronto show but wasn't part of the tour.  I didn't grow up with him on the radio and am not that familiar with his work, but I did think he played a mean guitar.  I'm glad I showed up early as Toad started before the official start time!  And they were one of the main reasons I went out to Budweiser Stage!)

Sept.:
Tafelmusik: Handel's London

Tomson Highway delivered his 5th Massey lecture on the Trickster at Koerner Hall.  (The lectures should be available here.)

Oct.:
Tafelmusik: Mendelssohn's Octet and Louise Farrenc's Nonet

Emerson String Quartet - Their farewell tour and final concert in Toronto (Koerner Hall)

Nov.:
Skye Wallace (headliner for first time at Lee's Palace)

Yo-Yo Ma performing Dvořák's Cello Concerto.

Esprit Orchestra: Violinissimo

Dec.:
Itzhak Perlman and Friends (Roy Thomson Hall)

The Lowest of the Low (Lee's Palace)

Two separate concerts by Kronos Quartet at Koerner Hall, including one where they were playing live accompaniment to a documentary film about Kronos.  Apparently, the cellist will be leaving Kronos soon, and this was her last Canadian performance!

Generally these were all great, though a few things didn't work as planned.  I somehow missed the pre-show concert in Oct. when Yefim Bronfman came through, and to be honest, the rest of the concert didn't click for me (largely because I was so mad at myself for getting my wires crossed).  Also, Tinariwen was supposed to play the Danforth Music Hall but cancelled without any explanation.  A few concerts or rather tours that were cancelled due to COVID were simply never rescheduled or at least Toronto was skipped, which was super aggravating.  While Maxim Vengerov's concert was postponed again, it should take place in just a few more weeks, so something to start off January on a strong note.  In general, concert tickets, particularly for rock shows, are completely out of hand, and there are several concerts I passed on due to exorbitant prices; that is certainly not likely to change in 2023 sadly. 

I don't know that I have any real favourites, but I certainly had never expected to see The Magnetic Fields live, so in that sense it was a highlight.  I suppose the two Kronos Quartet concerts and seeing Emerson Quartet on their farewell tour were also quite special.  And of course, I need to give a shout out to Yo-Yo Ma, who always is so enthusiastic in all his musical ventures (and an amusing cameo in the film Glass Onion).  I've seen him at least a couple times previously.

Edit: I should have mentioned that more informal music was back as well.  I never did get around to going to see anything at The Rex, but Streetcar Crowsnest had musicians, mostly jazz acts, come in for Crowsnest Corner on Thurs-Sat once the curtain fell on the plays, at several times over the year.  There was no cover for those shows, but I always bought lemonade from the bar.  I saw Alison Au a couple of times there and once at the Only Café up on Danforth.  (I hope this initiative returns.)   I also saw a couple of free lunchtime concerts at St. Andrew's, which I had always been meaning to but never done previously.  In 2023, I will continue to seek out these opportunities and perhaps make a bigger effort to get out to the jazz fest this summer. 

Best Theatre of 2022

I think I only saw 3 or so live theatre events in 2021, so it was not worth posting about them last Dec.  2022 was a much different and better story.  I probably saw close to as much theatre as I did in 2019 -- and maybe even more as in some cases I was trying to go out of my way to support companies that had just barely made it through the pandemic.  This post was fairly accurate, and I saw most of the events listed, though a couple were postponed one more time.

Perhaps somewhat incredibly this list is not everything I saw, but only the theatre pieces/events I enjoyed and got something out of seeing them.  

Jan.-Feb.: Nothing.  Everything was rescheduled due to Omicrom

March: 
Gloria @ Crow's Theatre

April:
George F. Walker's Orphans for the Czar @ Crow's Theatre (Eric Peterson had a moderate-sized part)

Annie Baker's The Antipodes @ Coal Mine Theatre (nowhere near as compelling as The Aliens, but still pretty interesting)

Sara Ruhl's In the Next Room @ Alumnae Theatre (I knew one of the actors in the production but didn't know he was in it until I got there!)

García Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba @ Buddies in Bad Times

May:
David Yee's Among Men @ Factory Theatre (a fictionalized encounter between Milton Acorn and Al Purdy.  I wavered on this but am glad I went.  The A-frame set was pretty incredible.)

Michael Hollingsworth's The Cold War Part One @ Video Cabaret (so very, very glad that Video Cabaret came back from the near-dead.  I'm hoping they do Part Two next year, and ideally do the two in repertoire; I'd go again for sure.)

June:
Two Weird Tales @ Red Sandcastle (Kafka's Metamorphosis and a Lovecraft story (The Mountains of Madness?) done with puppets (and in the latter case prestidigitation as well))

RUR: Torrent of Light @ Tapestry Opera (actually in the OCAD building)

Hamlet @ Stratford Festival (I was so glad to be back and taking the Stratford bus.  That said, I really didn't like this production very much, which was too modern and poorly thought through for me, though the cast got a lot of love from the critics)

July:
Detroit @ Coal Mine Theatre (Eric Peterson was also in this but in a small role)

Kamloopa @ Soulpepper (glad I gave this one a shot)

Henry V @ Driftwood Theatre (The Bard on the Bus tour came back to Withrow Park this summer!  Henry V was a distillation of Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 and Henry V!)

Mashup Pon Di Road (this was a Caribbean-inspired clown show put on outdoors at the Bentway near Fort York)

Toronto Fringe! (back in full swing.  I saw quite a few things with the best being the Crack of Doom (a musical), Aliya Kanani: Where You From, From?, Juliet: A Revenge Comedy, An Evening with Devon & Jackie, and Bubble Babz)

August:
Anne Marie MacDonald's Hamlet 9/11 @ Stratford Festival (I liked this much, much better than their Hamlet)

The Trojan Girls or The Outhouse of Atreus @ Outside the March/Factory Theatre (This was pretty amazing.  The cast doubled all their parts and were constantly running from the inside stage to the outdoor space (and the audience split themselves in two groups).  Went back a second time to see the inside part first.)

Sky Gilbert's Who's Afraid of Titus @ Red Sandcastle (an abridged version of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus reimagined as a promenade show)

Sept.:
August Wilson's Gem of the Ocean @ Shaw Festival (was really hoping Shaw would do more August Wilson but it doesn't seem likely at this point)

Apocalypse Play, or Bundle of Joy @ Common Boots Theatre.  (This was outdoor theatre at Hillcrest Park.  It was quite strange, unapologetically feminist theatre)

King Lear @ Soulpepper

Chekov's Uncle Vanya @ Crow's Theatre (again with Eric Peterson!  A solid production but not actually the best I've even seen)

Jeff Ho's Cockroach @ Tarragon

Oct:
Rajiv Joseph's The Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo @ Crow's Theatre (quite good but dark and a pretty depressing view of human nature)

The Ex-Boyfriend's Yard Sale @ Outside the March (hosted by Soulpepper) (cancelled twice but worth the wait!)

Nov.:
Chekov's Three Sisters @ Hart House/Howland Company (a very solid production.  sadly this seems to be one of only a handful of productions at Hart House, which hasn't returned to regular programming yet)

Requiem for a Gumshoe @ Red Sandcastle (so very strange -- a mix of Lovecraft, Norse mythology, vampires, werewolves and Raymond Chandler.  Entertaining but it should have been 15-20 minutes shorter)

The Waltz @ Factory Theatre (a sequel of sorts to Prairie Nurse)

Our Place @ Theatre Passe Muraille (very strong play about undocumented visitors from the West Indies oversaying their visas and working in a restaurant in Scarborough and the different paths they took)

Hannah Moscovitch's Post-Democracy @ Tarragon (a play with some truly unredeemed characters)

Gay for Pay @ Crow's Theatre (a slightly updated version of the Fringe hit)

Dec:
Entrances and Exits @ Tarragon Theatre/Howland Company (a wholly improvised show - I went and saw it twice)

It really was a very good year for theatre, and the fact that we were emerging from a pandemic makes that even more incredible.  If I had to chose the best of the best, I think it would be Hamlet 9/11 at Stratford and The Trojan Girls (Outside the March presented at Factory Theatre).  Followed closely by Our Place, The Ex-Boyfriend's Yard Sale, The Cold War Part One, and then maybe The Crack of Doom from the Fringe.  I was a little disappointed that Shakespeare Bash'd didn't make a return appearance like so many other companies (Driftwood and Video Cabaret in particular), but they are going to be back in Feb. 2023!  Granted they are doing King Lear (and I've seen that a couple times too often now), but I'll still go to show my support.  George Brown is also going to be back doing live performance, and I've got a couple dates booked in April, so something else to look forward to in 2023.

Best Books Read in 2022

I think this is obvious, but I simply mean I read these books in 2022 and most were published much earlier.

As mentioned elsewhere, I forced my way through Beckett's Three Novels, which I found unpleasant and vastly over-rated.  This is easily the biggest (reading) disappointment of the last decade.

Top 3 of 2022
Mandel Station Eleven
Conrad The Secret Agent
Kurkov The Milkman in the Night

Best novel reread:
Lamming In the Castle of My Skin 

Honorable mention:
Welty The Robber Bridegroom
O'Connor Wise Blood (might have been higher except for gratuitous racial slurs)
Arlt The Seven Madmen
Celine Journey to the End of the Night*
Maugham The Razor's Edge
Carter The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories
Roy The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (didn't really enjoy it much but it had compelling moments)
Bissoondath A Casual Brutality (the ending felt forced; overall, the flashbacks to life in Toronto were the best part)
Kurkov A Matter of Life and Death

And a tie between Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men and Giono's The Open Road, which seemed heavily inspired by Steinbeck and in particular this novel.

I actually reread several good-to-great novels including Crime and Punishment and The Satanic Verses, but I think I'll stick with the relative dark horse candidate In the Castle of My Skin, as there were some new nuances I picked up on, esp. during the ocean crossing scene.  

I am thisclose to finishing Farrell's Troubles, which would definitely be a top pick, but I guess I will wrap it up the first week of Jan.  Perhaps the rest of the trilogy will be as strong, and, in 2023, I will revert back to 5+ best books of the year, as I used to do...

* After many years of saying I would, I finally buckled down and read Celine.  I found Journey to the End of the Night pretty interesting (and so cynical about human motivations) but strongly disliked Death on the Installment Plan.  It's a shame as it had the potential to be so much better if it had focused on the narrator's current situation rather than diving back into his unedifying childhood adventures.

Update (11/28/2023): Starting to reflect on what I read in 2023 for this year's round-up, I went back through all my reading in 2022 as well.  I'm not quite sure why I finally picked The Ministry of Utmost Happiness over Breaking and Entering by Joy Williams.  I suspect in the long run, Breaking and Entering will remain in my memory longer, though that does depend to some degree on reading her later novels and stories.

Year-End Reflections

While I wouldn't say this was a great year, it was definitely better than 2021.  The only travel I did in 2021 was within Canada, and indeed I think I stuck to Ontario.  I went to Ottawa and Kingston, partly for the art but mostly for my son to get a sense of the campuses (at the time they still weren't operating full tours for prospective students, but we were at least able to go on campus and get a feel for what life there might be like -- and he decided fairly quickly that Kingston wasn't for him...).  We made a trip out to Hamilton and saw McMaster for the same reasons.  In contrast, in 2022, I went to DC (on a somewhat aborted mission), Boston and Chicago.  Also, in Spring 2022, we were able to get a proper tour of Carleton.  (I think 2022 was the first time any Canadian universities were doing in-person campus tours.) 

I suppose my son applied for universities at the end of 2021 but found out that he had been accepted in the spring of 2022, so in that sense the campus tour was nice but perhaps not the determining factor that it could/should have been, though I suppose if he came across any red flags on the tour there still would have been time to change his mind.  As I have alluded to in a couple of posts, he decided to leave for Ottawa!  (We had certainly been hoping he would go to university in Toronto or Hamilton.)  In fact, he caught COVID from some friends about 10 days before we had to move him up there!  It was extremely tight, but he tested negative right before we left.  That was a long, somewhat stressful drive, and certainly not one that I do very often.  I was glad I had paid extra to leave the rental car in Ottawa, and we took the train back.

The biggest theatre event in 2021 was seeing The Rez Sisters in Stratford (and having to rent a car since the Stratford bus was cancelled), and I saw the thoroughly misleading and disappointing As You Like It (as mangled by Cliff Cardinal).  Almost everything else I saw in 2021 was virtual, though I did see an interesting musical take on Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita in 2021.  Theatre came back to life in 2022, though everything that was playing in Jan.-May still felt pretty tentative and a bit risky.  It wasn't until June or July that theatre going became a lot more normal, at least for me.  I actually did see quite a few shows by year end.  (Perhaps that's an understatement...)

Concerts were pretty much the same.  I saw almost nothing in person in 2021, though I did see The Lowest of the Low at Lee's Palace in Dec. 2021 doing all the songs off Shakespeare My Butt, which was pretty epic.  I think almost everything else that I had planned to see in 2021 got cancelled or postponed into 2022, and I have a fairly long list of things to record in the 2022 concerts post.

Museums came back kind of early, and in some ways the Toronto exhibits I saw in 2021, especially the one on Picasso's blue period, were a bit better than those in 2022, though, in 2022, I did travel to see some incredible exhibits, including Guston in Boston and Cezanne in Chicago.  I did get out and did Nuit Blanche this year; actually this was the same day I got a booster shot.  I didn't think the art was particularly amazing, but it was just great seeing people out and about.  (There may have been a reduced Nuit Blanche last year, but I skipped it.)

Suzie Larke, Light, 2019

As I mentioned, I made some deck improvements right around Halloween.  Halloween was pretty much back to normal for the children, though we did have relatively light turn out this year (and I had to take a fair bit of candy to the office).

I know I feel a bit better about myself (and I suppose the state of the world) when I volunteer or donate to charity.  I'm not doing a lot of volunteering, though I do serve as a mentor to two UToronto students through Hart House's mentoring program.  I probably could and should do more than that, but it's a start.  I was fairly generous during Giving Tuesday and that last week in November.  I kind of spread my donations to the big dogs (United Way and Red Cross) and then mostly to theatre companies that I feel need my support and/or that have the best matching campaigns.  I gave quite a bit to Coal Mine this year, since they are trying to recover from a terrible fire that damaged their space.  (Fortunately no one was injured!)  I also donate to the food bank at Eastview, which is in my neighbourhood.  And then I typically donate to the Toronto Star's Santa Claus Fund and Fresh Air Fund.  I could always do more and give more.  I'll think more seriously about volunteering at Eastview next year.

At the very tail end of 2021, I heard from IRCC that it was time for me to take the citizenship test.  I spent a week studying up and passed it handily.  Then it was months before I heard from IRCC again (and they wanted another set of fingerprints!), but I was finally invited to a citizenship ceremony just a couple of weeks ago.  I could have held out longer to do the ceremony in person, but it was actually easier to do it all on Zoom, despite some major technical challenges, because my son was still in Ottawa and we were in Toronto.  I did feel a bit of a pang when we had to cut up the PR cards, since it was such a process getting them and then renewing them, though this is the next step up.  

I was expecting it to take weeks to get the certificates, but they showed up within a few days, and now I in the midst of applying for Canadian passports.  Ideally, we will apply first thing in 2023, and the demand will have died down a bit.  I'm not in any huge rush to travel, but I just want to get this crossed off my list of tasks for the new year.  Now I just need to decide if I am going to follow through on getting a tattoo to mark the occasion.  I have said it is sort of a silly late mid-life crisis, but better this than a lot of other things...

Depending on how things go at work, I might buy a small print that I saw over a Yumart, and I probably will renew my subscription to Brick Books and their Canadian poetry series.  I have one or two other low-end splurge purchases I might make, but at this point I can hold off a bit longer (at least until mid Jan.!).  One area where I did treat myself (though I didn't benefit quite as much yet as I would have liked) is to buy a stereo amplifier/receiver.  I've had a record player for a long time (2010 or before), but I only use it for transferring LPs to the computer.  I decided I really ought to get a system that would allow me to play LPs and perhaps CDs as well.  So when I was having my LP player refurbished a bit at Ring Audio, I asked about a set-up for a small basement rec. room.  They found a unit that actually had an FM tuner and then some mid-sized speakers (only one shown).  I later added a slightly quirky CD player (not in the photo).

Unfortunately, there was some weird buzzing in the speakers.  The internet gurus said it was either the speaker wire or the cable to the CD player.  The folks at Ring Audio thought it was more likely to be a diode or resistor in the main unit.  However, they weren't able to isolate the problem when I brought it back.  At any rate, I changed out the speaker wire and cable, and so far the problem seems to have gone away.  (Knock wood.)  And then by the time I got the unit back, it wasn't that long before my son came back on winter break and claimed the basement, since he gave up his room to his sister when he moved away.  But I'll have more time for listening to music in the new year.

And with that, I'll wrap up this post.  Best wishes for the tail end of the holidays!  Here's hoping that 2023 is better still than 2022!

Day by Day

Yesterday actually was a decent day.  The day before (Wed.) I had gone swimming for the first time in two weeks.  Yesterday I was able to bike in to work.  This has to be the deepest into winter I've biked (not counting that warm winter in Cambridge and Vancouver where you can generally bike year-round).*  It's not even that cold today, and I probably could have biked, but it is supposed to rain, and I didn't feel like dealing with that.  While I am probably done with the bike until March, it actually looks like it might be ok biking conditions on Sunday and Monday (when I am not actually working!), then a lot of rain and perhaps snow, but then the forecast is for chilly but bikeable conditions next Friday.  I haven't really decided what I will do.

I left work on the early side (for me) on Thurs. and made it home by 6:30.  Then I was able to go over to Staples at Gerrard Square and get passport photos.  (I'll circle back to this in an upcoming post.)  Then I went to the gym for a slightly abbreviated workout.  I think this is the first time I've been to the gym since the 16th and have been beating myself over it, especially since I haven't been biking as much.  (I actually did order a home exercise bike, and I expect that will arrive next week and I'll have to see how hard it is to assemble.)  I had called over to the gym either on the 23rd or 24th to see what their holidays hours were, but never got through, and I took that as a bad omen.  Then I got quite busy and didn't have a chance to go over anyway.  I'll try to get back into my new routine of two gym visits and one swimming session each week.  I don't really enjoy it as I am going through with the exercise (which certainly doesn't help!) but I do feel better afterwards.

I watched the last episode of Red Dwarf Season 4 with my son.  While I like the previous episode a bit better (the one where Ace Rimmer is introduced), it was fun.  I hope to carve off some time to watch longer movies with him, but not sure it will happen, since he has so many friends to see.  On the whole, it was a pretty good day.

In contrast, this morning has been quite a disaster, at least on the computing side of things.  I have been completely unable to get my computer to do anything internet related.  I had switched to Chrome just a while back, but I think I'm going to give up and switch back to Firefox.  I finally left for work in frustration.  Sometimes the network issues resolve themselves, though I have a sinking feeling that won't be the case this time.  Anyway, it should be an extremely quiet day today, and I am hoping that I can relax tonight and maybe get more reading in, though I also need to get my year-end blog posts up!

* I did manage to bike at least 5 and probably 6 times after the Dec. bike tune-up, so at least I got value from that.  Unlike so many of the cycling evangelists, I do not enjoy biking in winter and would never presume to tell people that it is easy and even fun.  It's not.  It's just that it is still somewhat better than the alternatives, particularly the buses with COVID still circulating and violent crime up quite a bit.

Boxing Day museum visit (AGO)

I do get a little stir-crazy on Boxing Day.  It's better in Toronto than it was in Cambridge, England where really everything was shut down -- including their bus service!  But of course few stores are actually open, though I guess the Eaton Centre is in a "tourist district" and can stay open.  Curiously enough, most, though not all, of the stores in Union Station were open, including the new Sephora.

At any rate, the AGO was open, and I convinced my wife and son to make an outing.  I had mostly wanted to make sure my son had a chance to see the Denyse Thomasos exhibit.  It actually runs through the end of Feb., but if he didn't see it on this trip he would miss it.

The weather wasn't too cold.  There weren't a lot of people out and about but a few.  We got to the AGO just a few minutes before noon.  There were a few people in line to get in but again not that many.  I wondered if the Yayoi Kusama Infinity Room had any availability.  (I hadn't booked ahead but there is a little kiosk to book a time slot right after you enter the AGO.)  Surprisingly, there were still a handful of slots for noon, so we signed up for that and headed straight over to the Infinity Room.  I'd been inside with my son before the pandemic, but my wife had never been, so that was cool.

After our minute inside, we went up to the 5th floor for the Thomasos exhibit.

Denyse Thomasos, Anchor, 2009

Denyse Thomasos, Untitled, 2012

The AGO now owns 5 or so of her pieces, including the truly immense Arc, though it is hard to say if any will be on regular display after this exhibit comes down.  I'll try to remember to write and ask.

Because it wasn't very crowded, I decided we would quickly go through the Leonard Cohen exhibit that just opened.  This is full of all kinds of ephemera related to Cohen.  Lots of snapshots, book covers, excepts from his notebooks and a few of his drawings or posters that he designed are on display.  

Not surprisingly there are a few video installations playing Cohen in concert.  I'm a little sorry I didn't take the opportunity to see him live, and I would have seen him if he had been able to tour one last time.  That said, I am definitely more of a casual fan, and this exhibit is aimed at the more hardcore fans.

Anyway, it was a nice change of pace to be out doing something on Boxing Day.

Boxing Day Book News

No major news, but I did get through Kurkov's A Matter of Life and Death, basically in one sitting last night.  It's almost a joke of a set-up: man hires hit man to kill himself and then discovers he wants to live.  It does seem stylistically and thematically to be closer to his penguin novels than The Milkman in the Night or particularly the more recent novel Grey Bees.  Anyway, it was quite entertaining (and very short).

I've just started Farrell's Troubles.  There's almost too much praise for this novel, but I'm about 50 pages in, and it does seem to be living up to the hype.  It's mostly set in a run-down hotel just outside Dublin (the ironically named Majestic) and the action begins in 1919, i.e. the time of the "Troubles" in Ireland. The novel focuses mostly on how the English ruling classes fail to adapt to said "Troubles."  I'm seeing some parallels to some of Molly Keane's early novels focusing on English aristocrats in Ireland, such as The Rising Tide or Two Days in Aragon.  Time After Time is more directly about the declining English ruling class in Ireland, but was actually written over a decade after Troubles was published, so if anything the influence ran the other way in this case.  (The depiction of the hotel and its staff actually reminds me just a bit of Peake's Gormenghast, though I'm not sure this was any sort of intentional homage.)  I'm guessing I won't quite finish it this week, though I suppose if I buckle down, I could wrap it up and add to to my best books of 2022 list.  I guess I can hold off a few more days, though I will be putting up my best concerts and best theatre posts shortly.

I'm trying hard not to expand this list because so many of them are quality books (and even a few bucket list books), and I definitely don't want to delay getting through Farrell's Empire Trilogy now that I have finally started in on it.  Still, I'll probably add Kingsley Amis's Girl, 20 to the bottom of the list.  Knut Hamsun is making a strong play to get added a bit higher.  I'm mostly interested in tackling Mysteries, but it seems clear I should read Hunger first, so I've put that on hold at the library.

I know I've written on this in other contexts, but it can be so interesting how one can reread a novel and either like it much better or less depending on how experience (and everything you've read in the meantime!) has changed you.  On top of that, reading a novel when one is stressed or in a bad mood is a very different experience (and it is a rare novel that can cause one to fully ignore daily stresses).  In this short interview with Philip Pullman he says that he wasn't ready for Middlemarch until he hit middle age, whereas he no longer cared for Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, as it was a young man's novel (or set of novels).  Personally, I think it is unlikely I will reread Middlemarch and I certainly won't reread The Mill on the Floss, which I strongly disliked, but I hope to reread Durrell and hope I am not so changed I don't like it any more.  That is possible of course.  There are a few novels I read in my 20s (or so) that had a strong impact on me, but then I really didn't think highly of them later on.  I no longer think Morte d'Urban is particularly profound, and I think it next to impossible for the climatic scene (of a gangster in a boat trying to drown a deer) to have happened at all, and then the book kind of unravels.  I still liked the first half or so of Bell's Waiting for the End of the World, but then really disliked the way the main character turned, trying to undo everything he had set in motion early on for no real reason that made any sense to me this time through.  I still liked but wasn't swept away by DeLillo's White Noise on the second read-through (back in 2018), though I think if I can manage a third read through (now that I have seen the movie) the magic will be back.  Crime and Punishment was still a good read but not the close to life-changing experience it was when I was in my teens.  (Perhaps because I just have too much life behind me now.  And I'm still pretty much alienated from society but it doesn't occupy my every waking moment like it used to.)  

However, all is not lost...  When I have reread them, the stories of Barthelme, Borges and Carver still stand up for me.  I've only reread one Pym novel so far, but it still works for me.  I still felt pretty much the same about Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita on later readings, though of course it isn't as full of surprises on a second (or third) go-around.  The same for Calvino's Invisible Cites, though I haven't had a chance to reread If on a Winter's Night a Traveler...  

Oddly enough, I usually react to movies pretty much the same on 2nd and 3rd viewings.  The one notable exception being Tati, particularly Tati's Playtime, which grew on me a lot!

It's Not 100% Procrastination All the Time

There are a few things that I don't put off until absolutely the last minute.  I usually manage to get taxes done at least two weeks before the deadline.  I'm not always scrambling to get the trash out in the morning.  (This was a real problem in Vancouver for some reason...)  Recently, I changed the bulbs in the kitchen light fixture.  They had gotten extremely dim, and the new bulbs make the whole place bright enough to cook in.  (What a concept...)

A few posts back I had alluded to things I was doing instead of blogging.  One of those things was dealing with a contractor who was replacing my backyard fence and putting up a railing on the back stairs.  I did put it off for several months, but it was s such a mild fall that I decided to go ahead and replace 4 more boards in the back deck (by myself).  I wrapped this up right around Halloween and then sanded and stained the deck the first couple of days of November.  (I had been in a minor bicycle accident injuring my knees, and this did not help!)  Anyways, my timing was pretty good, as the temperature dropped quite a lot the day after I finished.  That means I didn't get to enjoy the fruits of my labor this fall, and I'll have to wait until the spring.

One thing recently as that I had been having some issues with an external hard drive, and I bit the bullet and got a replacement hard drive.  I've spent the whole weekend backing stuff up.  Then I had some issues when using it with my laptop, though it was fine on the main desktop.  I wonder if the laptop just doesn't pass through sufficient current to keep the external drive happy.  That sort of undercuts the main reason I got it in the first place, but I don't mind having it unplugged as more of a true emergency backup.  One slightly annoying thing I found while I was doing this massive backup is the one classical box set has not been backed up, which is quite strange.  I guess I can take care of that over the next few days.

For a lot of others things, including creative writing, I  do work best to a deadline.  Mostly having deadlines helps me focus and prioritize, given how many other things I am in the middle of.

Late (or Just-in-Time) Xmas cards

The irony is that I hadn't gotten too far on this post, and was actually finishing sending off Christmas cards (or rather e-cards) when we had a power outage and all my work was lost.  So the fact I was procrastinating a bit meant I lost less work than I would have otherwise!  It was a pretty bad time for a power outage, given how bitterly cold it was.  Also our neighbourhood was one of the very few impacted by an outage (as compared to widespread outages in Quebec and parts of Ontario).  However, that also meant that the crews weren't all over the city trying to fix things, and we had power back in 45 minutes (and obviously didn't freeze to death in that time*).  I'm not entirely sure my daughter even noticed, as she generally works on her laptop with the room lights dimmed.

Once again, we didn't get that much snow, and I don't even see that the sidewalks are particularly icy.  (Not complaining about that!)  That said, I know the conditions were much worse east of here, with over 100 collisions on the 401 between Toronto and Kingston!  So the advice to stay home was wise.  I actually got out early yesterday (when it was raining and cold but not that cold) and got a few last stocking stuffers from the dollar store.  Also, I lucked out and was just walking up to the streetcar stop when the streetcar pulled up. I would normally just walk to Broadview, but it was a miserable day out, so I hopped on.  I had to return an overdue library book.  This is a book I planned to renew but someone else had it on hold.  I got it back two days late.  I feel pretty awful about that, but I just had to get through it.  Last week I had the same thing with a photo book (Sebastião Salgado's Migrations), and that was several days late as well.  I suspect that I would  have tried even harder to get them back on time if the TPL hadn't completely eliminated late fees as a (probably misguided) gesture towards equity and lowering barriers to library access.  (A better approach would be to make late fees means-tested with lower income readers not paying anything, but middle class and above readers would still get dinged.)  I actually had a couple of books out at Robarts, and those would have been returned on time if either my bike had been ready in time or the Kronos Quartet had a shorter encore or if Robarts Library was open slightly longer on Friday evenings.  But it's not a large fine, and I'll pay it next time I am there. which will probably be Tuesday at this point.

I also procrastinated and almost missed the deadline for buying an exercise bike (and getting most of the cost covered as part of my company's plan).  But I did get it in under the wire.  I also submitted a bunch of outstanding insurance claims and had a quick turnaround on those, though in that case I don't think I absolutely had to get them in before the end of the year.

One thing that always seems to catch me off-guard is the holiday card.  I guess because I can send them last minute (as opposed to mailing them out which takes far more pre-planning), I end up using almost all the available time.  I had the card together relatively early on Friday and sent it to my team and others I work with closely.  Then to some of the consultants I work with regularly.  Then over the day, I sent out messages to the people on my mental rolodex -- my extended family, connections from past jobs, connections from Chicago, connections from Vancouver, etc. with slightly personalized cover notes, which of course added some time.  I think I got it out to everyone by the end of the day, but I may have missed a few people.  I do wonder every now and then if I should keep up this tradition, but it isn't that much effort in the end.

I was relaxing a bit when my daughter told me her headphones were broken.  I waited until my turn to shovel the sidewalk.  Since I was already dressed for outside and booted up, I thought I would head over to Dollarama.  I got one block when I was hit with the arctic wind, and I just turned around.  I told myself I would do it the next day when it would be at least a bit warmer.

Then we waited through the power outage.  I took a bit of a nap, then woke up in the middle of the night** and finished wrapping the presents.  We don't have a big Christmas anymore, which is probably just as well.  This means that I am not going to be rushing around tonight, trying to get everything done.

Best wishes for the holidays and 2023!

* I wasn't trying to be entirely glib, as we have certainly had serious furnace problems over the years.  Anyway, the storm in Buffalo was so bad that some people were essentially buried in their cars and couldn't get out.  Over two dozen people have died directly or indirectly from the storm, including too much shovelling, whereas Toronto got off pretty lightly, all things considered.  Even the sidewalks are pretty clear, though I won't be biking anytime soon.

** This is apparently similar to the medieval habit of "two sleeps," which was discussed in this BBC article.

Sing-For-Your-Supper Revival

I only just happened to stumble across a post that Sing-For-Your-Supper is back and in-person!  While I found the Tarragon location to be pretty good, this should be a more-or-less permanent home at Assembly Theatre, which is a few blocks further west than the Theatre Centre (so a long ride home for me to be sure).  I don't know how long it will take the buzz to build, but one of the advantages of being at the old Storefront Theatre is that people could sort of see how groups could coalesce and put on their own shows at Storefront.  I can see the same thing happening at Assembly.  Now one thing that worries me is that I am clearly not going to be given such a free hand as I had post-Storefront where I had a long run where basically everyone one of my submissions was accepted.  They are going to tilt the playing field in favour of Black and other visible minority playwrights, as well as LGBTQ2S+ playwrights.  That's their right of course, but it may mean that this isn't really going to be a long-term home for me, and I'll have to do my own thing.  We shall see how it goes.

In the meantime, just having a source of external deadlines should prove useful to me.  (I basically only work to deadlines these days...)  I just took a piece that is roughly half of a TV pilot and spent some time cleaning it up.  It started out as exactly 12 pages long (the new script limit), so I didn't need to do too much, though I did squeeze in a teaser for what would happen in the next "episode."  Honestly, I'm not nearly as interested in this "series" as in the one about a planning office (inspired loosely by the Australian TV show Utopia -- though I want to be clear I've heard about this show but only watched about ten minutes of it).  I've written quite a few bits of this (usually anytime I was listening to jazz over at Crowsnest), and I just need to pull the pieces together, type them up and fill in some missing bits.  Even if I don't send that off to SFYS, I am starting to feel the creative juices flowing again.  It's been too long!

More Dec. Book News

I'm making decent progress through Bissoondath's A Casual Brutality.  I definitely am most interested in the flashbacks set in Toronto.  There have already been quite a number of interludes of violence or threatened violence on the island, and it seems clear Bissoondath is building up to a very violent climax.  Most of his novels, though not his short stories, are fairly tragic and some more than others stretch credulity.  After A Casual Brutality, I will be halfway through his oeuvre.*

I've tracked down most of the books that are swiftly coming up on the list at the bottom of this post, but I only could locate Farrell's Troubles out of his loose Empire Trilogy.  I knew I had a copy of The Singapore Grip, as I actually had two different editions(!) but only kept one.  I'm not entirely sure I did own a copy of The Siege of Krishnapur, though I thought it likely.  I'm not as sure about Koestler's Darkness at Noon.  I most likely owned a copy at some point, but I may have purged it in a move.  Or it is in deep storage...  At any rate, I spent close to a week checking the bookcases on all three floors of the house.  I then stopped by BMV on my way to Tarragon (to see another incarnation of Entrances and Exits!).  They had Darkness at Noon but in hardback for an inflated price. They didn't have any books by Farrell at all.  I'll keep looking for the Koestler the next time I'm at Circus Books, as well as at the library book sale.

However, the Farrell kept nagging at me.  I finally dug through one of the overflow boxes in my study and turned up the NYRB edition of The Singapore Grip.  Yea!  This just left The Siege of Krishnapur.  After reading a very positive review in the Guardian and learning that Hillary mantel rated it highly, I did some poking around.  It turns out that the Folio Society did a nice version of it (with an introduction by Mantel); I found a fairly cheap edition from a UK bookseller and ordered it.**  I can rearrange my reading list a bit if it is delayed in the mail.

One of the few remaining questions is what to do when I hit Gogol's Dead Souls.  I have two versions at home: one translated by George Reavey (Norton) and one by Bernard Guerney (Yale).  Nabokov felt that the Guerney translation was one of the best.  The Yale edition, however, only covers Part One with 15 pages of excerpts from Part Two.  The Reavey includes all of Part Two.  In addition, the inexhaustible Pevear and Volokhonsky tackled Dead Souls back in the 90s, and there is another new translation from Donald Rayfield (NYRB) that tries to synthesize Part Two into a coherent whole from all available sources.  While NYRB is going to be the easiest way to get this translation, there is a hard-cover version from Garnett Press that includes 96(!) illustrations from Marc Chagall (from a different, earlier translation).  Robarts (or rather Pratt) has a copy of this, and I'll have to see if the fuss is worth it.  One time I read three translations of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita back to back to back, though I dropped the Glenny quickly (as it was based on the censored version of the novel).  Am I really willing to read four dueling translations, even knowing this will drop down to three after Part One?  I guess I am at least willing to consider the idea.

While this isn't literary in the same way, I've been looking over a lot of photo books.  Fortunately, many are at the library.  I really enjoyed New York in Color by Ernest Haas.

Also, William Eggleston's work is new to me.  I managed to borrow most of his books from the various libraries.  In fact, Before Color was lost, but it has just turned up and is on its way to the hold shelf for me to pick up.  Finally, I've enjoyed Sebastião Salgado's work ever since I saw a major retrospective of his work in New York.†  His work is usually published by Taschen in these enormous coffee table books.  I did find it amusing though a little confusing that Migrations (Aperture), perhaps his single greatest work, is also published by Taschen as Exodus.

To add even more to the confusion, Taschen publishes two versions of Genesis. One is a massive 500 page tome, and the other is a smaller-format book of only 200 pages. I would definitely have opted for the smaller version if it was complete, but it is more like a best of Genesis. To be honest, I don't really have much room on the shelves for either version, so it is probably a moot point. I've now borrowed pretty much everything by Salgado, aside from Gold, which I just put on hold. Unfortunately, neither TPL nor Robarts appears to have Salgado's Africa, so I'll have to decide whether it is really worth the investment. As it happens, it seems the AGO Library does have a copy, so I may be able to flip through it (but not borrow it) and then make up my mind.

* As far as I can tell, Bissoondath has "retired" from writing, so after I read his short story collection and 3 remaining novels, that should be it.  In contrast, Guy Vanderhaeghe published a short story collection -- Daddy Lenin -- in 2016 and has very recently published a novel, August Into Winter, though it sounds like a bit too much of the old ultra-violence for me, so I'll probably skip it.  I'm also not at all interested in his cowboy trilogy.  I thought I only had to read Homesick and then the very short short collection The Trouble With Heroes and I would essentially be done with Vanderhaeghe (for the time being at least).  However, it turns out he has also written two plays (fortunately these are at Robarts).  Incredibly enough, Dancock's Dance was put on as an interactive play at Campbell House in 2017, though I certainly don't recall hearing about it.  I would most likely have gone.

** Though I just found out I need to pay another $5 in postage.  It's a pretty massive book, so I guess that's reasonable.

† Indeed, this might even have been the touring show of Migrations that Aperture put on in 2000-1.  It looks like I missed out on Genesis, which was at the ROM in 2013, so right before we moved to Toronto.

No Snowmageddon (Dodged a Bullet)

Now granted, other parts of Ontario, included Ottawa, were hit pretty hard by the storm last night, but in Toronto (at least south of Danforth) we just got cold rain that turned into slush.  I decided to skip the bridge (and thus going to the gym), but I did go to the grocery store and got a few staples (mostly fruit).  This morning, all the slush had melted and the streets/sidewalks were just wet.  I could have even biked to work but skipped it.  I didn't even have to wear boots!  This drastically increases the odds that I go to the gym tonight.

I do wish that the transit agencies hadn't over-reacted to the storm warning and cancelled so much service, when in fact this was not a storm by any stretch of the imagination.  Again, it didn't impact me, but certainly messed up the evening rush hour for a lot of people.  

This reminds me a lot of the Snowmageddon they were calling for in NYC back in 2001.  The snow ended up staying further north, and while I think Boston was hit hard, NYC barely got a dusting.  I had gone to work as usual and had no trouble getting home.  

Believe me, I'm not complaining we didn't get hit with a lot of snow (yet), but it does make it hard to plan when the forecast is so wrong.  I might well have decided to go out that evening or might not have pushed so hard to get to the library in the morning to avoid the storm that wasn't.  Here's a site listing a few other times they hyped up a storm that then fizzled out. 

Edit (12/17): Indeed, I was able to get to work on Friday with regular shoes (not boots), and I probably could have ridden my bike.  I actually did bike downtown on Saturday.  It's worth trying to take advantage of this, as it is likely to snow next week, and they are forecasting a white Christmas.

December Books

I forgot to mention that I just finished Kuprin's The Duel.  This is part of Melville House's Art of the Novella series and is actually the longest of 5 works on dueling. Kuprin dwells on the pointlessness of dueling, but generally makes army life in a backwater army post seem boring and indeed pointless.  There is a restlessness among the officers that leads to excessive drinking, gambling (and cheating at cards) and cheating on spouses, which in turn often leads to dueling.  While the officers in The Duel are all too present in each others' affairs, they mostly seem to feel they would be better off at war.  This desire to see action (and feeling that military life is otherwise pointless) is also a major theme running through Buzzati's The Tartar Steppe), though the main character feels far more isolated than these Russians.  It appears I read this in 2016 or so.  Given that The Tartar Steppe is a fairly short work, I may revisit it one of these days.

I got only a few pages into Julia Kristeva's Murder in Byzantium before giving up on it.  There's such a fine line between parodying a bad thriller novel and simply being a bad thriller, and she crashed through it...

If I was still reviewing for the Canadian Challenge, Bissoondath's A Casual Brutality would be a good pick.  It's about a doctor from a tiny Caribbean island who went off to Toronto to learn medicine (and escape his fate of running the family store!).  He marries a Canadian woman who decides to move back home with him.  She does not adjust well to island life.  I've just hit the moment where she demands that she be sent back to Canada with their young son.  I'm not quite sure where the novel is headed, though frankly the doctor is a fool to stay on the island as it seems to be headed towards lapsing into chaos, followed by military rule.

That's pretty much where I am at with the reading.  I will likely get through the Bissoondath, Kurkov's A Matter of Life and Death, J.G. Farrell's Troubles and perhaps will just have time to start Baker's A Fine Madness before the month is out.  I should also get started on this volume on the transportation impacts of Covid that I agreed to review for the Journal of Urban Affairs.

Edit: Well, I am dipping my toes into The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al-Aswany.  It has a large cast of characters, so let's see if I can keep track of them all...  I see from the receipt that I picked this up at Powell's North in Chicago.  I miss that place.  I used to be able to walk to it from my condo and spent a fair chunk of change there...  Eventually they closed this store down and also the one in the South Loop, so only the mothership in Hyde Park is left.

Brushes with Fame

I've been thinking a bit about how many famous (or theatre-famous) people I have seen.  Not all that many.  I was at the Save Our Cities March on Washington.  This was probably 1992 or maybe 1993.  I saw David Dinkins (former mayor of NYC) and Mario Cuomo.  My memories are fading though. I often tell myself that Jesse Jackson was there talking with them, but that's probably not the case and simply a false memory.  Perhaps I journalled about it or emailed someone at the time, though email was still very much in its infancy then!  I do remember going to a rally (with my mom) where Geraldine Ferraro was campaigning (this would have been 1984 before I could vote).  I was at a convocation at Northwestern where Ruth Baden Ginsberg gave the keynote.  That was pretty exciting, and I had a reasonably good view.  I had a much more distant view of George H.W. Bush when he gave the commencement speech at University of Michigan in 1991, and his use of the platform as a campaign stop was appalling.  I was supposed to be at an event where Bill Clinton was campaigning (for his first term) but he was losing his voice (this was right before the first big debate).  Like all Democrats in Chicago, I had a few opportunities to go to Obama fundraisers (for only a few hundred dollars before he was the Democratic nominee and the price skyrocketed), but I passed.  I don't exactly kick myself over this, but it would have been cool in retrospect.  I did see Rahm Emanuel in the hallway of the Chicago Cultural Center, probably getting ready for one of the more expensive fundraisers.

Moving away from political figures, I won't dwell too much on musicians, as I have paid to see any number of bands.  I suppose I could mention it if I saw them out of context, i.e. not on stage.  I'm pretty sure I saw the members of Dee-light crossing Broadway near Strand Books in Manhattan, but a friend says I was imagining this.  I did talk briefly to Dave Holland at the Chicago Jazz Showcase and I got Joshua Redman's autograph in Toronto when he was just starting out and only had one CD out.  (I also got Neil Swainson's autograph at the Rex here in Toronto, but he may be a bit too obscure to count...)  Similarly, I don't know if Skye Wallace will ever become really famous but I know her just a bit and have talked with her after a few shows.

I've probably mentioned this elsewhere, but I have seen a few well-known authors (mostly poets) give readings, and I usually managed to get a signed book.  This list includes Paul Auster, Margaret Atwood, Jim Carroll (at a reading that Allen Ginsberg failed to show up for), Adrienne Rich (though that book was stolen!), Doris Lessing, Gwendolyn Brooks, Charles Simic, Haku Mahubuti, Michael Ondaatje and Susan Swan.  I saw Timothy Findley give a talk, but he wasn't signing anything.  Tim O'Brien gave a reading in Ann Arbor, though I don't believe I had him sign anything.  I listened to Toni Morrison give the Tanner lecture at UM, which was pretty cool.  The next day Amiri Baraka had some follow-up remarks.  I mentioned that I saw Salman Rushdie in person twice, though he wasn't doing book signings out of obvious security concerns.  I just saw Thomson Highway giving the last of his Massey Lecture series here in Toronto, and there was a book signing for Laughing with the Trickster, and I went ahead and bought the book and stood in line to have it signed.  He was pretty affable, even taking photos with people in line.  I just said something about how great the recent Stratford production of The Rez Sisters was, and then moved on.

In terms of public intellectuals, I saw Homi Bhaba and Jürgen Habermas speak.  

I suppose theatre is where I have seen the most people that the general public is at least aware of.  Probably Angela Lansbury (in Blithe Spirit at Mirvish) is the most famous, though Alan Alda isn't too far behind.  (I saw him in a production of Jake's Women).  Also, I saw Kevin Kline in a Shakespeare in Central Park production (probably Measure for Measure, but I might have to double-check).  I saw John Mahoney at least once at Steppenwolf in Chicago, as well as John Malkovich (in a fairly forgettable play).  I've seen Laurie Metcalfe in a few things (including Detroit at Steppenwolf and Three Tall Women on Broadway (in the production with Glenda Jackson!)).  I managed to see F. Murray Abraham twice (once in Angels in America and also in The Merchant of Venice in Chicago).  I saw Alfred Molina in Red on Broadway.  Another notable Broadway sighting was Chita Rivera in Kiss of the Spider Woman.

Chicago got several key pre-Broadway try-outs, and I saw Spamalot with David Hyde Pierce, Tim Curry, and Hank Azaria.  Hard to imagine ever surpassing that cast!  In fact, I will probably pass on the Stratford version of Spamalot next summer because it could never  measure up.  We also saw Nathan Lane and Bebe Neuwirth in The Addams Family.  I think that's the only time I've seen Nathan Lane live, but I may be overlooking something.  I saw Brian Dennehy in Krapp's Last Tape (Goodman in Chicago) and Waiting for Godot (Stratford).  

In terms of Canadian performers, I saw Brian Bedford a few times at Stratford.  I saw Martha Henry in The Tempest and also in Marjorie Prime at Coal Mine.  I probably should have tried to see her in Three Tall Women, but it wasn't my highest priority that summer (compared to avoiding Covid).  I've actually seen Eric Peterson in quite a few shows and on most of the main stages in town: Billy Bishop at Soulpepper, Detroit at Coal Mine, The Watershed at Tarragon, The Model Apartment up in North York and Uncle Vanya and Orphans for the Czar at Crow's Theatre.  He certainly gets around!

I'm sure I'm forgetting a few encounters, but this gives a pretty good flavour of which celebrities I've managed to see, though in most cases this would have been at some distance.

Reading Updates

So just what have I been doing instead of blogging?  Working fairly hard.  Going to a lot of theatre (most quite good) and several concerts (ditto).  I'm actually seeing Kronos Quartet for the second time this week, at a concert that was rescheduled twice already due to Covid!  I have been trying to do background research for an article, but that has been sidelined.  While I was late both times, I was able to get two book reviews turned in to the Journal of Urban Affairs, and indeed I have one more review to work on (for a book on the Covid impacts on transportation actually).  Given that I am winding down my biking around own (as winter kicks in), I am ramping up my reading on trains.  

Over the past few months, I read Penelope Fitzgerald's Innocence, which I didn't think was particularly good (it's sort of like a Natalia Ginzburg novel, though not as good, with English interlopers popping up every now and again).

I slogged my way through Beckett's Three Novels, not enjoying them in the slightest...

Kingsley Amis The Alteration.  While I liked the boys' after hours discussions in their dormitory, most of this alternative history novel (that was mostly concerned with the morality of castrating boys to keep their singing voices pure) left me very cold, particularly the ironic twists at the end.  I'm finding I just don't rate Amis very highly as a writer, as there always seems to be a current of misogyny running under the surface of his books.  I do have a few more books do work through fairly soon, but if I feel the same way about them then I will take his remaining works off my list.

I was able to reread Rushdie's The Satanic Verses.  I'm fairly sure I liked it a bit better this time around (than when I was in my 20s), which is the opposite of how I found Midnight's Children, feeling it was over-stuffed and maybe a bit too didactic or perhaps programmatic (i.e. what happened to this boy represents this moment in Indian history and what happened to this girl represent this).  I probably should dig out Shame and see how I feel about that on the second read through.  My suspicion is it has held up well.  Anyway, I thought Rushdie had at least one too many side plots in The Satanic Verses.  I didn't think the bit about the trek to the Arabian Sea really added that much to the overall novel.  I thought the final confrontation between the two main characters wasn't really dramatic enough and didn't conclude satisfactorily.  But a lot of the episodes along the way, esp. in contemporary London, were enjoyable.  While I suspect he would have been in trouble with the religious authorities no matter what once he suggested that it was incredibly convenient that the divine messages that Mohammed was receiving aligned with his personal interests, it surely was section focused on a team of prostitutes adopting the names of Mohammed's many wives that really sealed his fate.

I went ahead and reviewed Mandel's Station Eleven (last summer actually) and liked it a lot (making my best of 2022 list), though I think it was just as well I held off for a while.  It just hit too close to home in 2020...

I also liked Conrad's The Secret Agent.  I guess it did appear slightly before Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday.  Maybe something was in the air with several authors adding anarchists to their rota of stock characters.  I don't happen to have this edition with the Edward Gorey cover, but it's pretty rad.

I will say Conrad surprised me with a few of the twists toward the end of the novel.  The Secret Agent isn't usually discussed as an influence on Arlt's The Seven Madmen, but I thought there was at least an affinity between the two novels.

I did not like DeLillo's Cosmopolis at all, as the main character, Eric, is a pretty loathsome specimen of the 1% (here a billionaire hedge fund manager who seems to be losing his mind as his play against the yen starts unraveling).  Anyway, he makes a number of questionable and generally immoral decisions as the novel progresses.  It is a quick read, but that still isn't enough to recommend it (and I think I'll skip the movie version that Cronenberg directed).  However, I was amused that DeLillo sneaks in a homage to Bellow's Seize the Day (also a book about one day in the life of a Manhattanite).  In fact, Cosmopolis could be read as an inversion of Seize the Day (and if no one has used this as the thesis of a paper or article, I offer it up freely).  Then Eric stumbles across the funeral of a musician he reveres and he loses it, weeping and carrying on, much like Tommy does in Seize the Day, though in Seize the Day, Tommy is really crying for himself; Eric's tears are more ambiguous in Cosmopolis.

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy was pretty bleak,* especially the last two sections.  I definitely preferred the first third, which contained some terrible events but didn't dwell on them.  In contrast, the last sections focused on the never-ending conflict in Kashmir.  In general, the Ministry of Utmost Happiness veered dangerously close to the category of torture porn. It is somewhat interesting that 9/11 is almost a blip to these characters. The aftermath of the train fire (and riot) in Gujarat impacts several characters more, though it still is treated mostly off-screen, as it were. I gather A Burning by Megha Majumdar is not based on this tragedy (as I had assumed) but is more of a fictional composite. I've been thinking of reading A Burning and will move it up a bit on my list, so I might get to it in late 2023.

At some point, I decided I should read some Ukrainian literature and naturally turned to Andrey Kurkov.  Kurkov is best known for Death and the Penguin and the sequel Penguin Lost, which I read a while back. I found The Milkman in the Night quite interesting and surprisingly more upbeat than Death and the Penguin.  In fact, the ratio of happy to unhappy endings (for the 10 or so main characters) was suspiciously high.  One might almost say Kurkov had mellowed out.... This was one of the better novels I read in 2022.  For some reason I thought there were some hidden parallels between this and Bulgakov's** The Master and Margarita (mostly because of the prominent position of cats in each), but it's perhaps too much of a stretch.

Kurkov has found himself a bit of a roving spokesperson for an independent Ukraine since the Russian invasion.  I think I'll read his novella, A Matter of Life and Death, relatively soon and Grey Bees some time next year.

I'm not quite finished with Elizabeth Taylor's Blaming, but I should wrap that up over the weekend. It's her final novel, and she knew she was dying, pushing herself to correct the proofs, despite being so sick.  It's basically about a widow who doesn't quite know how to handle an acquaintance who keeps imposing on her grief.  I'm not that crazy about any of the characters, but it's also a short novel.  So far the only Taylor novel I liked with few or no reservations is A View of the Harbour, but she has at least eight other novels and a thick volume of short stories I have yet to read, and I hope to find they are more to my taste. 

Just a short while back I was able to trade in stack of CDs, and one of the books I got in trade was Ann-Marie MacDonald's Fall On Your Knees.  I got this primarily because Canadian Stage is putting on an adaptation of the novel.  However, we are introduced right away to a poor but plucky youth in rural Novia Scotia who learns to become a piano tuner, but then a few pages later marries a child bride (13 - ick!) and then starts getting abusive when she doesn't keep house well or can't seem to cope with their new baby (double ick!).  First, I feel a bit whipsawed by how MacDonald is toying with the readers' sympathies, but more to the point I am just not in the mood to deal with all this family trauma.  I'm going to pass on seeing the play (and go to a concert instead) and put the book away in the basement for at least 5 years before I decide whether to give it another shot.   

Now I'm actually fairly close to wrapping up one reading list with only 6 books left, though 3 of them are actually a trilogy, which I find somewhat daunting.  I'm not sure I have ever completely closed out a list, so that will be exciting when it happens.  I have further to go on this list, but I'm making decent progress, getting through the books at a reasonable clip.

So what is next in terms of my short-term to medium-term reading?

I think it looks like this:

Bissoondath A Casual Brutality
Kurkov A Matter of Life and Death
JG Farrell Troubles
Baker A Fine Madness
JG Farrell The Siege of Krishnapur
Al-Aswany The Yacoubian Building 
JG Farrell The Singapore Grip
Vanderhaege Homesick
Kingsley Amis Take a Girl Like You 
Gallant Home Truths & Varieties of Exile
Mansfield Selected Short Stories & The Garden Party
Bellow The Adventures of Augie March
Desani All About H. Hatterr
Narayan The Man-Eater of Malgudi
Copeland Hey Nostradamus!
Hamsun Mysteries
Gogol Dead Souls
Shields Larry's Party
Malraux Man's Fate
Fontane Effi Briest
Flaubert Madame Bovary
West Miss Lonely Hearts & The Day of the Locust
Saramago Blindness
Maugham Cakes & Ale
Waugh Decline and Fall
Kurkov Grey Bees
Carter Wise Children
Austen Mansfield Park
Maxwell The Chateau
Reuss Horace Afoot & Henry of Atlantic City
Percy The Moviegoer 
Munro Open Secrets
Clark Blais This Time, That Place: Selected Stories
Natalia Ginzburg Family Lexicon
Mary McCarthy The Group
Pym Excellent Women
Conrad Under Western Eyes
Koestler Darkness at Noon

Then there are 3 or so non-fiction books I am reading, including the transportation and Covid one, and to add some philosophy to the list also On the Nature of Things by Lucretius.

In terms of stretch goals, I would really like to get back on the path of reading a Dickens novel each year, and I will try to get through Oliver Twist and also Dombey & Son (only slightly out of order and with the additional benefit of being about the impact of the railways on English life!) in 2023.

I might consider rereading Rushdie's Shame next spring/summer, as well as Morrison's The Bluest Eye, which is even shorter.

I'm also toying with the idea of rereading DeLillio's White Noise.  I found that it didn't make as much of an impression on me the 2nd time through back in 2018 (at least beyond the toxic airborne cloud and the general dread of death).  I just saw the movie, and I thought they had added all these crazy plot twists at the end, but then I went and looked and they are right there in the novel!  How embarrassing!  Now they did remove all mentions of the son's friend and gave the father-in-law's lines to a professor buddy and did a bit of restructuring, but basically it was all there and I simply forgot.  (Taking too much Dylar, I suppose...)  Also, the highway scene that closes the book was cut in favor of an extended music credit sequence set in the supermarket (to drive home the point that rampant consumerism helps us avoid thinking about death).  Overall, I thought it was well-done, and I'll probably watch it again when it starts streaming on Netflix in late Dec.  If I do reread White Noise in 2023 or 2024, I think the movie will really help me lock in the plot this time around.

This will probably realistically take me through the late summer or fall.  In terms of a major doorstopper to add to the list, it would be great to read Atwood's Maddadam Trilogy or Fante's Bandini Quartet or even reread Durrell's Alexandria Quartet.  One can always dream...

P.S. Even though I am likely to read 13 books by Canadian authors, especially if I count poetry, I just don't think I am going to sign up for the Canadian challenge again.  Just not really feeling enough motivation, or frankly interest, in doing that many reviews, but I'll still post on books that I find worthy, Canadian or not.

*  It won't quite make the top 5 bleakest books, but probably would make the extended list of 10, at least until it is pushed to the side by Victor Serge's work.

** I only found out recently that Bulgakov was from Kyiv, though he was culturally Russian.  There is an on-going movement to "pause" (not cancel) Bulgakov and Tchaikovsky while the war rages on.  I don't have an issue with pausing Tchaikovsky, but Bulgakov, like Shostakovich, was almost always in disrepute with Stalin and probably would have been a dissenter against Putin's actions (though how openly is itself an open question).  However, it turns out apparently Bulgakov was in fact a bit of a Russian nationalist, which is awkward indeed for his defenders...  Maybe it is just as well that I reread The Master and Margarita in 2021 (for the third time actually or maybe fourth since I read two different translations back-to-back back around 2011 or 2012) before everything became so dire in Kyiv and eastern Ukraine.

 

Edit (05/15): I feel more than a bit of satisfaction that Glenn Sumi's review was anything but a rave.  He basically came out and said if you didn't absolutely love the novel, then this was a very poor use of 6 hours of one's life.

Restarting the Blog

It's hard to know quite how to go about starting up again.  Should I acknowledge that I went dormant for three months?  Do I need to apologize to my (few) regular readers for abandoning this site?  The page views stayed relative high for a while but dropped off quickly after two months of silence.  (I imagine it will take a while before views pick up again.)  I hope it (going dormant) doesn't happen again, but I can't promise, as the same time pressures are still very active in my life.  All I can say is that I think almost every day about something I wanted to blog about, and there is a huge backlog of ideas I still think worthy of getting up on the blog and out there into the ether.  I guess I am just trying to get back on track in blogging and other things.  One small trick is to blog when I am in a bit of a upswing in my moods.  I generally find that I do feel better (about myself and the state of the world) when I have been more altruistic.  As it happens, I did give to quite a few charities on Giving Tuesday, and I am doing a small amount of volunteering through Hart House, which is all to the good.  

I will probably try to stick to shorter form updates and "quick takes," at least for a while.  So for example, I'm certainly sorry the House barely slipped from the Democrats' grasp, but I am pleased that the Democrats outdid historic trends and outperformed expectations and actually held the Senate.  (And my congratulations to Sen. Warnock who beat that fool Hershel Walker, not that it should have been remotely that close it in the first place!)  I'm of course devastated that Roe was overturned, but this was probably a large part of why the Democrats did better than expected, combined with the GOP openly supporting cranks, racists and fascists...

I'll push the reading list updates to a second post.  Instead I will close on a positive achievement.  It has taken many months (and certainly many more months than it should have due to the lingering impacts of Covid), but next week I will finally take the oath at a Canadian citizenship ceremony.  It's still a virtual ceremony, which is unfortunate.  However, if I requested an in-person ceremony, it sounds like it would add several months to the process...  If all goes as planned, the kids will become citizens at the same time.  So that's very exciting, though it makes me just a little sick to my stomach that I need to cut up my PR card as the ceremony concludes.  Then there is a gap while waiting on the certificates in the mail, and then we need to go apply for our new passports.  So there is probably a 2 month window where it would be a challenge to go to the States, though I still have my US passport.  (It's mostly that Canada strongly prefers its citizens to return to Canada on a Canadian passport.)  As it happens, that is when TRB takes place in DC, though I am not scheduled to be going there this year.  I think the crazy backlogs have died down to some extent, and I can go apply for a passport at the Gerrard Square mall, which is just so much more convenient than dealing with the U.S. Consulate.  One other thing to mention is that I was able to jump through all the hoops for permanent residence and citizenship on my own without an immigration lawyer (though my employer in Vancouver helped me get the original work visa).  This is all but impossible in the States, where you really do need to lawyer up for almost everything!

Ciao for now, amigos...

Mini-reviews

Just thinking over the books I've read lately, I liked Nabakov's Pnin more than I expected.  Generally, Nabokov leaves me pretty cold (which makes it even more surprising I've read 8 of his novels!).  At the time Nabokov was writing, it was much easier to land faculty jobs, so Pnin must have been really quite a marginal talent to not have gotten himself a more secure position.  Anyway, I wouldn't say this is going to cause me to run out and read the rest of Nabokov next week, but I'll continue my slow plod of one or so a year.  Pale Fire will probably be next.

I did enjoy Joy Williams' Breaking and Entering, though I had some trouble understanding the motivation of the main characters.  Why did they break into other houses?  Not to steal but to impersonate long-term guests apparently.  This would make more sense if they were on the ropes with nowhere else to go (like the couple in Detroit, but they have their own house in Florida.  I suppose they just wanted to lead a different life.  At any rate, I'll try to squeeze in Williams' latest two novels at some point soon. She's definitely less interested in quotidian struggles and is focused much more on environmental collapse, which is what is keeping me up late these days...

Ali Smith's Companion Piece was a quick read, and indeed I read a lot of it on my phone during the set breaks at the various concerts I was at this summer.  But it is a weird book.  It is set at the tail end of COVID restrictions in the UK, where some people are embracing the freedom while others are still very cautious.  (While Smith doesn't say so directly, her narrator may well be of the opinion that Boris loosened restrictions just try to save his own skin politically.)  Smith's narrator has a father in the hospital, from a heat attack or some other non-COVID reason, but she needs to maintain a kind of quarantine in order to visit him.  Then out of the blue, a former university acquaintance and her family come to crash at her place and she has to flee to her father's flat.  I'm not sure I would really want to watch it, but I'm surprised no one has done a contemporary remake of The Man Who Came to Dinner where the critic comes down with COVID and can't leave.  (One of my SFYS pieces explored this in a limited way.)  Anyway, this part of the book works pretty well, though it just reminds me of all the hijinks of Keeping Up Appearances that would never have happened in the U.S. because it is not as easy (or safe!) to impose on Americans the way that Hyacinth imposed on her neighbours.  The other part of Companion Piece was vastly less satisfying, as it was sort of a fever dream about an outcast girl from Medieval times.

I finally wrapped up Death on the Installment Plan coming back from Niagara-on-the-Lake.  The ending was quite disappointing, as Ferdinand is crashing at his uncle's house and starting to get sick, and that's it.  There is no linkage back to the first chapter where Ferdinand has cone through the war and become a doctor.   Given his general lack of talent and gumption, it's all but impossible to understand how this could have come to pass.  At any rate, I'm glad to be done with Celine.

The next several books on deck are substantially shorter, and I hope to get through them fairly quickly:
Penelope Fitzgerald Innocence
Roland Barthes The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies
Martin Amis The Alteration
Ali Smith Public Library and Other Stories
Joseph Conrad The Secret Agent