Feb. Reading

I'll start off with an announcement of interest only to me and that is I have finished booking all the out-of-town travel I am expecting for the near future.  Of course, work might take me somewhere (and in fact we just won more work in Calfornia).  I don't really want to travel to California at the moment, but I would be open to traveling west to Vancouver, as they are close to 20 degrees warmer than we are at the moment.  (This extended deep freeze is really bringing me down, including the fact that I can't shake this cough.)

I've had tickets to see Angela Hewitt in Ottawa for a while now, and I finally got around to booking the Via tickets and a hotel in Byward Market.  This should be fun.  I'm expecting to bring Nabokov's Ada, or Ardor on the train.  Then I am off to see Shaw's Heartbreak Hotel at the Shaw Festival in August.  I believe this is the only Shaw production they are putting on.  Last year, I was on the fence on seeing Major Barbara.  (I heard that the production in 2012 or so was much stronger.)  However, it was literally impossible to find a weekend matinee where the bus actually ran.  Such bad scheduling.  There were still several dates that I would have considered this summer, but the bus didn't run.  However, I did find a date in August that worked.  I read recently that the Shaw Festival is hoping to coordinate with Harbourfront and bring some Shaw productions to Toronto.  I'm all in favour of that, even if they probably will mostly bring the musicals over, which don't have a lot of interest for me.

As it turns out, this is going to be a major Stratford season in terms of what I am trying to catch.  I'm seeing three plays with my wife on one weekend (perhaps ironically right after Fringe has ended, so I won't be able to pick up any more material from our stay at a BnB).  I was a bit surprised when she told me she wanted to see Death of a Salesman and Othello and then probably Waiting for Godot.  I hadn't really planned on seeing Godot, as I just saw a good production at Coal Mine.  However, Paul Gross is in it, and I believe it is the only time he is acting at Stratford this summer.  Anyway, then I go back in Sept. for a long day to catch Saturday, Sunday, Monday by De Filippo and The Tao of the World, which is a modern version of The Way of the World, but set in Hong Kong.  It sounds interesting at any rate.  I have a few longer books including Skvorecky's The Bride of Texas and maybe Vanity Fair that I might take along on the bus ride(s) down.  I am going to skip Midsummer's Night's Dream and The Tempest, as they just put them on too often.

Anyway, I wasn't expecting it, but Murakami's The City and Its Uncertain Walls turned up at the library.  I thought I had paused the hold for longer.  I decided I will hang onto it, but probably not get started on it until I have read a few other books, mostly likely Faulkner's The Wild Palms, O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find and McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (so a bit of a sweep through Southern literature).  But before I can get to this, I have some poetry collections to quickly read and return, as well as two novels by Slovak authors (including Mothers and Truckers!), which have to go back to Robarts soon.  So the Murakami might be waiting for a while.  Also, I didn't think it would turn up in time, but I am being sent a copy of Kaveh Akbar's Martyr!, which is the book our work book club is discussing in Feb., so I guess I'll also read that once it turns up.

I had tried to renew my copy of Jean-Baptiste Fressoz's More and More and More, which is an extremely depressing non-fiction account of how we never have managed any energy transitions nor stopped using coal or even wood as fuel, so the hope that we will suddenly start using renewables (and stop global warming in its tracks) is a complete fantasy.  We're clearly going to break through the 3 degree mark.  I really do regret that environmentalists haven't made any more traction and the world we are leaving for our children is going to be a fairly dreadful one as these bills come due.  I can only say that I have avoided owning a car or driving for most of my adult life, I stick to a vegetarian diet (which also is less carbon intensive), and I try to do most long-distance travel by train rather than flying.  And my work has generally been to support transit projects, though I have not worked exclusively in that domain.  Someone else had a hold on the book, so I couldn't renew it.  I'm skimming it right now and should be able to return it tomorrow, only a day late.  I also need to start reading a book on megaprojects, which I agreed to review for a journal.  

So certainly a fair bit of reading on deck for Feb., which will have to be balanced against revising my Fringe play.

Edit (02/08): I'm making decent progress through the poetry volumes, though I really need to focus a bit more on this megaprojects book.  I think this time around, my favorite poet has been Karen Solie.  She has several poems involving transportation (and my objective in reading this much poetry is at least ostensibly to finish up my transportation poetry anthology).  In her Griffin-winning collection Pigeon, there is a poem about a rough bus ride called "Medicine Hat Calgary One-Way" that I liked a fair bit (and would include if the anthology ever gets off the ground...).  I have made two extremely frustrating trips to try to look over Konchan's The New Alphabets at Fisher Rare Book Library.  I'm at the point I don't really care much any more.  If there is a Thurs. where I am coming up to see something at Koerner Hall (like an Esprit concert at the end of March), I might try again, but my interest is really low at this point.