Catching Up on Reading

I ended up taking the TTC over to Skye Wallace's gig on Wed. evening.  I used the time to read a few more chunks of Baldwin's Giovanni's Room.  I think I had mentioned I was a bit annoyed at the Secret Life of Books folks for SPOILING the ending of the novel, but indeed, Baldwin has something in mind much closer to a Greek tragedy where the fate of one of the characters is pre-ordained, so we know within only a few pages that the guillotine(!!!) awaits one of them.  The countdown to the fatal blow is very much a recurring theme throughout the novel.

I was actually pretty fortunate with the TTC, and a 72 bus turned up right away and there were no disruptions on Line 2.  I had never been to Burdock Music Hall before.  It turns out it is a space pretty similar to Cameron House, where I saw Skye play once.  It is just past Dufferin on Bloor, so I decided I would grab a bahn mi sandwich at the place near Paradise I eat at when I am in a rush.  I made it just at 8:03, and the opening act (Flora Falls) had just started.  There was actually a free stool right by the wall, so I parked myself there all night.  

The wrist-stamp

 
While I enjoyed Flora Falls and liked their back story (she's from Australia but moved to Berlin, and he was from Vancouver and also moved to Berlin), I took the time to finish reading Patrick Grace's Deviant (on my phone).  As much of Deviant is about gay life in urban Canada, there were actually some clear parallels with the (sordid) gay demi-monde that Baldwin was describing in Giovanni's Room.  Interestingly, at the time, homosexuality was not illegal in France (while it very much was illegal in the UK, the US and Canada), though it was very much seen as deviant and shameful.

It was an interesting gig, particularly as Skye was featuring completely new material off of a forth-coming album and didn't do any of her hits.  She also didn't do an encore!  It does seem she has truly broken up her band.  She still plays a lot with her bass player, but the guitar player and keyboard player are out of the picture.  Life imitating art to some degree, not that I ever was able to share my short playlet on the same topic with her.  I hung out a bit after the gig and replaced Terribly Good, which suffered some damage in the flood, and is probably my favourite overall album.

I had about 15 pages left in Giovanni's Room, so I just powered through it when I got home.  Tonight, I'll probably have at least a bit of time before the TSO concert (and thankfully my TSO tickets did turn up in the mail!) and at intermission, so I'll start on Harvey's Orbital and probably skim MacIvor's How It Works.  Then Friday I am taking the Stratford bus and will have a couple of hours more or less between plays, so I should definitely finish up Orbital (in time for Book Club!) and make a very good dent in Thien's The Book of Records.

While I am definitely behind where I would like to be in my reading, I can finish up the remaining library books: Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun Denis Johnson's Train Dreams.  At the top of my list after that are Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49,* Baldwin's Another Country, McCuller's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Garcia Marquez's Memories of My Melancholy Whores** and Iris Murdoch's Under the Net.

A pretty good list as we go powering into Autumn.

 

* I really dig the Jacobean play he dreamed up -- The Courier's Tragedy.  I kept reading it as The Courtier's Tragedy, though I guess no play by that title exists either...

** I'm fairly sure I will find this disappointing, which is one reason I have delayed reading it, however, I suspect I will still like it better than his "lost" (or rather saved from the scrap heap) novel Until August, which was (as expected) a let down.  I'll have to try to get back to some of his best work next year, maybe starting with some of the shorter pieces like Leaf Storm, No One Writes to the Colonel and Chronicle of a Death Foretold.