Gender Trouble

In a bid to correct the gender bias in his reading habits, Pasha Malla made sure half of the books he read in 2013 were by women. While he discovered novels he might otherwise have overlooked, the experiment left him with mixed feelings:

I don’t feel particularly better about myself having read 51 books by women. If the point of this project was to transcend numbers—to glean some understanding of a gender other than my own – I’m not sure how George Eliot’s Silas Marner, about a man, was a better selection than, say, Daisy Miller. (A master of human psychology like Henry James surely offers equally perceptive insights into any character, male or female.) In fact, my most revelatory experience of gender came reading Saul Bellow’s Herzog. The book’s particular flavour (“a revenge novel,” a friend of mine calls it) can be summed up here: “Women,” claims the titular character, “eat green salad and drink human blood.” All ironies aside, Herzog’s simplistic and hostile relationships with women felt cautionary: how blithely male resentment can extend beyond an ex-wife to half the people on earth! And isn’t reading most stimulating when we find ourselves not mollified by but in opposition to a writer and his ideas?

The Poetry Review that Facebook Rescued

So here's the dirt: Poet reviews three books of poetry for national newspaper. Editors of said newspaper cut loose one book before publishing review. Poet sees his altered copy and freaks out on major social media site. Editors do damage control by placing review on website followed by the paper itself. And the publisher of the once-excised book? Pleased as punch. Read it here.

"Less is More in These Sparkling Stories"

Over at the Globe & Mail, Jim Bartley reviews Daniel Griffin's Stopping for Strangers :

It only takes a page or two to conclude that Daniel Griffin values precision – a precision not of meticulous detail, but of economy, of the extraneous shorn away until a vital core is reached: a core of character, of an exchange of words, of a scene, a story. He gets, as many a new writer does not, that the less an author says, the more the reader can enter, must enter, the process of imagining. Rather than being told what is, you collaborate in its discovery.

To listen to Daniel read the title story of his collection visit his website.

Sparks and Cuffers

Mary Dalton, bookworm:

Zadie Smith and Michael Ondaatje (among others) said it exactly when they remarked that, if forced to choose between reading and writing, they would forego the writing. For me, too, reading is the vital act. And if this desert-island game were to go further, if the choice were between books and furniture, or books and a fine wardrobe, it’s the books that would stay.

Find the rest of Mary's Globe & Mail essay here.

A womanizer and future king

As John Kalbfleisch writes in his book This Island in Time: Remarkable Tales from Montreal's Past, "Montreal has seen many royal visitors over the centuries. The first was Prince William Henry, third son of King George III"--the womanizer in question. And it is this book which is featured today in the Globe and Mail's revised book section and its inaugural Web presence, which links to an excerpt from the book. As part of a monthly series, the Globe is focussing on what Canadian book clubs are reading. This Island in Time is the choice of a 30-year-old club in Montreal.