Anderson Cooper's Got Nothin' on Me...

In the past few months, a number of people have asked me where they can find other examples of my writing. I'm not sure if they're asking to be polite, if they are bored with reading about books, or if they genuinely think that I have some talent (see pic.) Whatever the reason, I'm sad to say that for the most part, the blog's the thing.

There are a couple of exceptions ... I will admit to being a sporadic correspondent with some far flung friends. Quite honestly, I absolutely adore everything about the letter writing process. Picking the appropriate stationery for my mood, striking the right balance between asking and sharing, walking to the park to drop it in the post -- it's just such a wonderful experience. And yeah, I know it's old fashioned and inefficient, but there's something so delicious about receiving notes in well-traveled, slightly tattered envelopes. At least I think so.

The other exception is my journal. Every once in awhile, something compels me to capture an idea, copy out a line of text, or sort out on paper what's going on in my head. Usually, my journal is epistolic and the entries are addressed to an unnamed reader. This implied audience changes from entry to entry depending on my mood. What doesn't change is that as soon as my journal is full, I destroy it. As a kid, I'd have secret burning ceremonies where I'd toss the book into the fire pit at the cottage. Now, I'm a little less melodramatic and just run pages through the shredder. So satisfying.

In fact, the whole idea of this blog has been a little weird for me. Knowing that there's a possibility that someone other than myself will read the post has definitely changed the way that I write, and in some ways, it has made my writing less honest. For those of you that are paying attention, I'm sure some of the real me shows through -- I thought, however, that for a change a pace, I'd give you an uncensored example of that other girl. The one you don't hear from very often. And as evidenced below, probably with good reason ...

Untitled

If I were Wordsworth, I would describe your beauty in simple terms
And ask that intercessions by my fervent tongue please you, not make you sad
If I were Shakespeare, I would celebrate our love
And as Capulet and Montague, we would shine brightly for a moment, then blaze across the sky like a falling star
If I were Donne, I would die a thousand little deaths
And ask which quarrels move, though you and I do love.

But I am none of those men and my words are as unfathomable to me as standing stones.
You are the field in which they lie -- trying to find meaning.

Darling Nikki

In the Cut

Susanna Moore

Vintage

While I wouldn't exactly describe myself as particularly well-read, I will admit that I consciously try to maintain an open mind when it comes to selecting titles. If you've been following this blog for any length of time, you'll notice that I prefer fiction to non-fiction, I've got a decidedly unhealthy relationship with fantasy literature, and aside from the occasional memoir, I'm not much for biography.

One of the genres that has been suspiciously absent from my repertoire has been erotica. I'm not sure why it hasn't made the queue (might be the recovering Lutheran in me,) but in the same way that I've never watched a porn flick, smut, as my mother terms it, has never held much appeal. Imagine my surprise, then, when I found myself quite engaged by In the Cut -- an erotic crime novel set in Giuliani's NYC.

I will not mince words -- the narrator (a cunning linguist) was, at times, quite vulgar. There are no euphemisms for the sex act in this novel -- just raw, dirty words. Maybe it's because the narrator was a woman, but I didn't feel that the female gender was being objectified by the text. In fact, from a characterization perspective, this book is the perfect foil for Chandler's depiction of the sexes. The women in Moore's novel are complicated, well-drawn and curiously detached. The men, on the other hand, are willful creatures controlled by passions and motivated by desire. The inversion of standard sexual convention was quite intriguing and to be candid the ending to this novel was brilliantly done. I'm not sure if I'll come back to this genre any time soon, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy myself. Three anima/animus out of five.

Still Looking for Mr. Right

The Righteous Men

Sam Bourne

Penguin

A few weeks ago, my best friend and I decided to catch the latest Jet Li movie and grab a burger at our favourite diner in the west end. As usual, we didn't plan it very well and had time to kill between the end of our meal and the start of the show. Instead of going to the movieplex to play air hockey and spend pots of money on overpriced video games, we ended up at the bookstore.

For Peter, I think it was a fairly worthwhile trip. He managed to spend a half an hour in front of the Ian Rankin section and eventually came away from the shop with a couple of good reads. Unfortunately, the literary gods were not as kind to me and stuck me with what I can only describe as a complete dud.

I struggled to get through this novel. The writing was bad, the story was implausible, and with the number of redundant technology explanations included within the text, I can only conclude that the author assumed his audience would be made up of either Luddites or octogenarians (okay, okay ... and maybe also my dad.) While I will admit to liking crazy Messianic cult stories as much as the next person, they have to be, at a minimum, interesting cult stories. The Righteous Men wasn't remotely engaging and it has the dubious distinction of being the first work reviewed on this blog that I'm going to tell you not to read. Zero mitzvahs out of five.

What a Dick!

The Lady in the Lake

Raymond Chandler

Vintage Crime

How is it that, until quite recently, I was probably the only person on the planet who'd never heard of Raymond Chandler? Oh ... so that's not ringing any bells for you either? Forget Chandler, then, what if I said Philip Marlowe? That's right, movie buffs, I've finally been introduced the literary version of one of the greatest detectives of all time.

According to my friend Russ, The Lady in the Lake is not a terribly good novel. In fact, he had actually recommended another of Chandler's works, but the book shop in Ottawa didn't have it in stock. As it turns out, I'm quite glad because I actually loved this story. The plot is dead (pun intended) simple -- two wives go missing from a remote cabin nestled in the mountains outside of LA. One of them (Marlowe's not sure which one) is discovered at the bottom of a lake. Was it murder? Suicide? A tragic accident? Marlowe doesn't really care -- he's paid to ask questions and solve cases and that's where his interest ends.

What I liked best about this novel had to be how it was told. As I was reading, the voice in my head sounded very much like a radio drama -- lots of dialogue, short, descriptive sentences and just the right amount of mood. I could "hear" Marlowe speaking -- it was almost as if I was looking out at the world through his eyes and hearing his voice from inside his head. Sublime. Oh, and in case you were wondering, I'll definitely be coming back to Chandler over the course of the next few months. The Lady, in this case, is definitely a ten.