I've been reading The Children's Book recently, and came across a passage that struck me as important. If you want to understand A.S. Byatt's work, not the whole of it, of course (post title notwithstanding), but the catalyst, the detonator, the idea that acts as the prime mover, you'd do well to think very hard about this passage.

All you need to know in advance is that the book takes place in early Edwardian England, and that Patty Dace, Arthur Dobbin, and Rev. Frank Mallett have decide to organize a lecture series, and are meeting to discuss the topic and potential lecturers.

She put on her spectacles, and said to Frank that they should perhaps find a title for a series. Dobbin said he thought they should find exciting speakers first, and then make up a title. Although Dobbin had been shy and ill-at-ease at Todefright he felt in retrospect that he had been privileged and delighted to meet the glittering folk in their fancy dress. He wanted to hear them again — Humphry and Olive, Toby Youlgreave and August Steyning, the anarchists and the London professor who worked with Professor Galton on human statistics and heredity. He said that he had heard some very interesting ideas about folklore and ancient customs whilst in Andreden. Maybe she could think of those.

Miss Dace said she was interested more in change. She wanted lectures on new things, the New Life, the New Woman, new forms of art and democracy. And religion, she said, looking bravely at Frank.

Frank sipped his tea and said thoughtfully that in fact there was only an apparent contradiction. For many of the new things looked back to very old things for their strength. The theosophists looked back to the wisdom of Tibetan masters, for instance. William Morris's socialism looked back to mediaeval guilds and communities. Edward Carpenter's ideas about shedding the stultifying respectability of Victorian family life looked back also, to human beings living in harmony with nature, as natural creatures. And the same was true of the vegetarians and anti-vivisectionists, they required a wholesome respect for natural animal life, as it was before technical civilisation. In the arts too, Benedict Fludd, for instance, wanted to return to the ancient craft of the single potter, and to find the lost red glazes, the Turkish Iznik, the Chinese sang-de-boeuf. The Society for Psychical Research had rediscovered an old spirit world, and lost primitive powers of human communication. Old superstitions might furnish new spiritual understanding. Even the New Woman, he said, venturing a half-joke, sought freedom from whalebone and laces in Rational Dress but also in free-flowing mediaeval gowns. Women's work in the world appeared to be new, but in the old times abbesses had wielded power and governed communities, as principals of colleges now did. Maybe all steps into the future drew strength from a searching gaze into the deep past. He would almost dare to propose himself as a lecturer on this theme.

I don't do resolutions. Not because it's a cliché; I sometimes think those are all right. Rather it's because I just don't ever stick to them. Things happen, blah blah blah. I could give you excuses, but that's how things wind up going. So, inspired by Adrienne's post (and obviously aping her post title) I'm going to say a few words about what I hope the new year has in store.

First of all, I'm going to get a new job. This really isn't optional, since I've just been freelancing since August (and I'm definitely going to be doing more of that; I've already been doing some freelance editing this year, and I've been back from the holidays for less than a week), but at this point anyway, it's not paying the bills. I'm trying to keep optimistic, but this is honestly going to be simultaneously the hardest and the most important part of my new year, both in terms of the task itself, and keeping my spirits up.

I want to read more poetry. And I've already started! I'm nearly seventy pages into Wallace Stevens' Collected Poems. I've said for a long time that he's my favourite poet, but I'm not sure if that's necessarily the case. I really admire his work, and "The Idea of Order at Key West" is my favourite poem of all time, but maybe that's not enough. I'm going to start with books of poetry already in my collection (the Stevens is a textbook left over from a Modern American Literature course I took with Stan Fogel as an undergrad), which means poets like Anne Sexton, E.E. Cummings, Anne Carson, Don McKay, Ezra Pound, Adrienne Rich, David Donnell, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and a bunch of others who show up in various anthologies. I admire poetry as a form, but I don't feel like I understand it very well, particularly contemporary poetry, and I find that I either connect instantly and profoundly with a poem, or it bores me and I want to move on. I don't know if this is normal, but it's starting to bother me, and I want to work on it this year.

I want to start writing and blogging more, particularly about television. I've said things like this before, and it would be easy to say "and this time, I really mean it," but I've been a serious fan of television as a medium my whole life, and at this point I think I have a strong enough grasp of what's going on and the necessary critical language to write about it seriously. It would be nice if I could get paid for it, but I've come to realize that if I've got something to say I should just say it regardless. I plan to start with a series of posts about the amazing sitcom Community—and before you say anything, I've already got drafts started. As for blogging about other things, I also have drafts of book reviews and other posts, I just need to finish them. To be honest, the biggest obstacle is the stress of looking for work; it's difficult to concentrate on the writing I do for myself with that looming over my head. (I would also like to say that 2012 is the year I stop making excuses, but really, nobody keeps that resolution.)

This will surprise no one who knows me well, but I'm kind of a geek. I like Star Trek and Star Wars, video games, science fiction novels, anime, and roleplaying games (well, some). I own complete runs of Cerebus, Preacher, and The Sandman (or did before some folks borrowed some of the latter without returning them). Hell, I even got about a third of the way into writing my own tabletop RPG once. Yeah, that's right, I'm that guy. But over the years I've drifted away from those roots. I don't read as much SF/F as I used to, I haven't played an RPG in years, and I can't even remember the last time I watched a new anime series. The truth is, the deeper I got into "fandom," the more I found two equal but opposite impulses within the community extremely unappealing. The first was the impulse from some in the community to relentlessly nitpick every trivial little thing that was even a tiny bit inconsistent or outside their expectations—which goes beyond criticism and into entitlement—and the second was the impulse some have to go easy on people working in genre because it's been ghettoized for so long and "we're all in this together" (or some other sentimental nonsense the critic in me can't abide), which helps no one, as it gives us a false sense of the work. Anyway, neither of those impulses are representative of the fan community as a whole (and it's more a collection of related communities than a unified entity anyway), but they made me not want to be a part of it all the same. I got into James Joyce and art films, A.S. Byatt and The Wire, and for a long time didn't look back.

The thing is, you can't read a lot of contemporary literary fiction, or watch a lot of television and film—not even the art house versions of same—without seeing how they have been influenced by and intersect with what we talk about as genre work. I'm not ashamed of being a big nerdy goof. Long time readers will know that I've blogged extensively about William Gibson's books, for example, plus reviewed his last two for Quill & Quire, and even interviewed him for Canadian Notes & Queries; additionally most of my professional book reviews have been of books that straddle the line between genre work and "capital L" literature. But I never felt a kinship with the community, and drifted away in favour of other priorities. This year I want to change that. I spent most of December reading Robert E. Howard's Conan stories, and now I've moved on to H.P. Lovecraft. I've also, almost clandestinely it feels like, been reading Raymond Chandler, Ian Rankin, Stieg Larsson, Elmore Leonard, Fred Vargas, Michael Dibdin, David Montrose, P.D. James, James M. Cain, and so on, and enjoyed pretty much all of them unequivocally. So I'm going to read a lot more genre fiction this year, and even try and see if I can connect a little with the community. We'll see how it goes. I may even write about some of it.

So that's a lot of rambling nonsense, but those are things that I hope will happen in the coming new year. As usual, comments and suggestions are welcome.

Please note that this review may include spoilers. As a general rule I do not share the SF/F community's aversion to that sort of thing (it quite frankly gets in the way of a critic being able to give a full and honest assessment), so I'm not going to be careful about it. This is your one and only warning.

If you're into media—any kind of media, be it books, music, film, whatever—there is a term you will eventually hear thrown around: crossover success. A crossover success is when a work or artist from one genre, say, a rapper, achieves success with the fans of another genre, like indie rockers, or even better, with mainstream audiences. Stephen King and J.K. Rowling are massive examples from the book world. Before King, horror had largely been relegated to the third tier of the genre fiction ghetto (although to be fair, aside from the big names it still sort of is), and Rowling probably did more to mainstream fantasy and kid-lit than anyone since C.S. Lewis. Most crossover successes are not that big, but they are pretty special things.

So with that in mind, I'm going to tell you two true things about Triptych. The first and most important thing is that it's a wonderful, complex novel in the traditions of Ursula K. Le Guin and Phyllis Gotlieb (the latter in kind of an oblique way), and it absolutely deserves considerable crossover success. The second thing is that it won't get it, and for the most ridiculous of reasons. It's not that the book deals frankly with difficult questions of sexuality to a degree that has the potential to shake-up mainstream audiences, though you'd be forgiven for thinking that. No, it's because it suffers from Porcupine's Quill Syndrome. You see, the Porcupine's Quill is a really amazing Canadian literary press (not Triptych's publisher, but they are notorious for this, so bear with me). They publish excellent books that deserve critical praise and popular attention, and they put them in the most off-putting, god-awful ugly, embarrassed-to-be-seen-on-the-subway-with-it covers you could possibly imagine. And Dragon Moon Press, who have clearly shown themselves to be excellent judges of what should go between those covers (by virtue of having published something as good as Triptych in the first place), have saddled Frey's book with a cover that conforms to just about everything mainstream audiences hate about SF book covers, implying so many of the stereotypes that make them think they don't like genre fiction in the first place that I can guarantee it will be enough to keep them away (because I have ignored books for the exact same reason, and I am a lot more SF-friendly than a great many of my mainstream literary-minded friends). As harsh as that sounds, I believe it to be the absolute truth. I encourage you to not be that person, because the book I'm about to tell you about deserves your attention.

Triptych takes its name from the relationship between the three main characters: Specialist Gwen Pierson, her partner Doctor Basil Grey, and Kalp, the alien who becomes the third in their aglunate (perhaps taken from agglutination, a term from biology that refers to a clump of cells usually bound together by a different kind of cell, its root being the Latin word for "glue"), which has its closest human analogue in the polygamous marriage, and is the primary social unit for Kalp's species. The book also has a three part structure, each (more or less) focusing on one of the main characters, with Kalp's being both the longest and the most engaging.

As is natural with stories involving time travel, events in Triptych don't always happen in the right order. It opens with Kalp's death, immediate and visceral. Frey does an excellent job of making the reader feel Basil's pain and shock at seeing Kalp killed in front of him, no easy feat given at that point we don't know—and therefore have no reason to care about—any of the characters. We then move almost immediately, via time machine, to Gwen's early childhood where she and Basil stop a murder and try to perform some emotional triage. At this point Triptych looks like it's being set up to be a thriller—an unusually emotionally aware thriller, but still. And then we get to Kalp.

The middle section of the book sees Kalp become the (third person limited) point of view character and Triptych suddenly stops resembling a thriller. Kalp and his people arrived on Earth as refugees, after their own planet was destroyed. Frey takes us through Kalp's culture shock expertly, using the alienness of his species' biology (which is where I see the Gotlieb)—particularly his unusual aural-sensitivity and a facial structure that makes recognizing and reproducing human visual cues difficult—to emphasize how similar, how recognizably human and familiar his situation is and what it does to him emotionally. Frey makes it impossible for the reader not to connect with Kalp, handily disproving all the stereotypes about SF being unable to do anything sophisticated with character. Even after opening with such a heavy emphasis on the thriller elements, Triptych is fundamentally about character. I wanted to spend a lot more time with Kalp, and it was genuinely heartbreaking when I came to his death the second time. Frey handles the thriller/time travel elements of the novel well, but her character work is so good I think that if she wanted to she could deliver an exceptional SF novel (or a novel in any genre she chooses, really) built on character alone.

Of course the aglunate and accompanying issues of sexuality are absolutely central to Triptych. Gwen and Basil are already partners when Kalp comes into their lives, and Frey is very delicate about how she works his curiosity and cultural norms into their world, until it becomes a natural part of that relationship. And for the most part it works. I say "for the most part," because it sometimes seems a little too smooth. Accepting sexuality as a spectrum, and polygamous (or other) relationships as being as valid as, and equal to, straight monogamous relationships doesn't necessarily move one's position on that spectrum, even though Frey is perfectly right about the pressures unexamined social structures put on how we see love. Gwen and Basil go through all the expected turmoil as they think about their position on that spectrum for perhaps the first time in their lives, realigning their expectations for themselves and their lives, but it sometimes seems too compressed a time frame, especially given how traumatized Gwen initially seems when Kalp makes his first timid, confused advances. Likewise with the speed that Kalp's people are accepted by governments and integrated into society; it seems overly optimistic to me (not because of his peoples' sexuality, but simply because paranoia and xenophobia seem like the default positions on the best of days, though they do get their fair share of bigots doing what bigots always do). The sex scenes themselves are very well done, though at times unsettling (if only because they are a bit outside my wheelhouse, as I kept picturing Kalp as a large blue cat or wolf with certain humanoid features, and that put him into uncanny valley territory, a combination that hits my creepiness button a little).

The thriller plot wraps up cleanly, although not as cleanly as it could have, which leads me to my only other issue with Triptych. For the most part, Frey's prose is quite good, and it is especially good when she's writing about Kalp. His voice (well, by proxy anyway) comes through with considerable sharpness and individuality. But when she's more focused on Gwen and Basil, specifically when writing about the violence that frames the story of their relationship, she is not always at her best. In the early days, pulp SF/F (I'm currently reading Robert E. Howard's Conan stories from the '30s, but I have read quite extensively in early SF as well) leaned very heavily on modifiers to define its "style"—by which I mean using lots of adverbs and adjectives—and they still seem to show up in the prose of SF/F writers whose style otherwise eschews them, in the same way that detective novels still sometimes sprout overly-clever metaphors more than seventy years after Raymond Chandler published The Big Sleep, as if those things manifest on their own, a feature of the genre that asserts itself independent of the individual writer's will. Using three modifiers when one—or none—would do the job better just seems to be one of those things for SF/F writers. I find that when I encounter it I spend so much energy trying to parse how they all fit together that I can't always keep track of what's going on, and that happened to me one or two times at the beginning and end of Triptych, in particular during scenes of violence.

These are minor quibbles, though, and Triptych is definitely one of the strongest books I've read this year, and certainly one of the strongest SF novels I've read in quite some time. If there's an SF fan on your Christmas list, or even someone who isn't generally an SF fan but loves strong characters, Triptych would make them an excellent gift. While you're at it, pick one up for yourself.

Some weeks ago I was at the Toronto launch for Robert J. Wiersema's sort-of memoir, Walk Like A Man. Because I know Rob in the let's-grab-a-beer kind of way, I was part of the entourage that wound up shuffling with him to some late night diner/bar combo down near The Esplanade, and there I found myself seated next to author Adrienne Kress. Kress, it turns out, is more fun than eight separate monkey barrels, and so I got her to write down the titles of her books so that I could look them up at the library. And look them up I did.

The obvious place for me to start was Alex and the Ironic Gentleman, as it's her first novel, and, based on the last page of the book, introduces characters that appear in her follow-up, Timothy and the Dragon's Gate. Now, I don't generally write about books for young people, not because I don't read them (though they are a long way from my primary reading material), nor because I don't enjoy them (I have enjoyed several in the last few years), but rather for the same reason I don't write about poems and books of poetry: I don't feel like I read enough of them, or understand them and the culture around them well enough, to offer anything like an informed opinion. I'm making an exception for Alex and the Ironic Gentleman because a) I liked it a lot, and b) I really enjoyed meeting Adrienne Kress, I think that if you can say something good (and genuine and honest and not at all sucking-up) about the cool things someone you've met or sort-of-know (ish?) has done, it's better to say it than not. So anyway.

Alex and the Ironic Gentlemen is about Alexandra Morningside, who is ten-and-a-half years old and lives above her uncle's doorknob shop. The novel opens as she is entering her sixth year at the Wigpowder-Steele Academy (the names in this book are great). Alex is smart, inquisitive, and capable, and she takes immediately to her new teacher, Mr. Underwood, who apart from being a bit charismatic, really engages with his students and teaches interesting and unusual things. He's also, it so happens, heir to a pirate fortune. When Alex's uncle is killed and Mr. Underwood kidnapped by a rival pirate after Underwood's treasure, Alex embarks on a quest to rescue him, boldly diving into a world reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland (in its quasi-episodic structure, and in Kress' use of clever, off-kilter almost-archetypes), but more about growing and trying things out in a world that is both modern and anachronistic, that is full of gomi (in the Gibsonian sense, "uncounted strata of message and meaning, age upon age, generated over the centuries to the dictates of some now-all-but-unreadable DNA of commerce and empire"), than it is about standing firm in the face of Opium-trip fantasies as in Carroll's tales. Kress creates this world through a unique voice that blends British and North American dialects and structures in a way that's smart, clever (not the same thing!), and often belly-laugh funny.

There's a lot to be said about the plot, and about the consequences that come from not yet having learned the difference between attractive ideas and good ones, and about different ideas about what it means to be weak or strong (seriously, I could write a ton about the end of this book, but that would be giving things away), but mostly I'm going to focus on two of the peripheral, episodic bits that I quite liked.

First there's Lord Poppinjay, who runs a hotel in the middle of nowhere, and will be a figure familiar to anyone who's ever held a job, particularly one in the service industry. He's lit on the idea that his staff should perform "Mental Dictation" (Kress is quite fond of Capitalizing Important Things, and frankly so am I), ie. they should run his hotel by reading his mind. Alex sorts all this out with a craftier version of declaring the emperor, or in this case, Lord, has no clothes, but at the same time it winds up being a very entertaining send-up of what it can be like entering the work force, or being the boss, or even cooperating in any kind of endeavor where communicating expectations is key. Poppinjay is silly and over the top, but he means well, and the whole episode winds up resonating on so many levels, with implications about how children can experience the adult world, the demands of class, making decisions and dealing with others and blah blah blah there's just too many things that gobsmacked me with their rightness about Poppinjay and his hotel that there really isn't time to mention them all. Plus the bits with the fridge were very Douglas Adams.

And then there's the Daughters of the Founding Fathers' Preservation Society, which is remarkable in so many ways. The Society consists of a number of elderly ladies who are guardians of the town's one real historical treasure, the preserved home of Alistair Steele, philanthropist and all around good guy, but ancestor to the greedy folks who wound up causing all the piratical feuding in the first place. The Society figures prominently early on in Alex and the Ironic Gentlemen, as the Steele Estate is home to the treasure map indicating the whereabouts of the Wigpowder treasure, but after that they make only intermittent—but terrifyingly comic—appearances.

You see, there's this red velvet rope (is it velvet? Kress never says, but it is in my imagination), and Alex steps beyond it. This is a Big Deal. But here's the thing: you already knew it was a Big Deal. How could you not? Red ropes, velvet or otherwise, are signifiers of status and access and even agency that we learn to recognize at a very young age. They are the kind of archetypal boundaries we push as youngsters and respect with powerful rigidity as we get older. When we're kids it's daring to go past one, and generally speaking the worst thing that happens to us is that our parents are told to bring us into line, or we get the boot from wherever we are that needs red ropes. In themselves they are flimsy, completely ineffective obstacles, but they teach us to understand the nature of taboos and symbolic boundaries, and I think it's fair to say that along with respect, there may even be a few drops of fear attached to them for some of us. After all, as we get older they no longer just separate us from dusty libraries in homes preserved by a local Society, or corral us into the right theatre at the cinema, they also separate us from the wealthy, the famous, and the powerful. The consequences of crossing one of those red ropes without permission could be getting arrested, or even (if, say, Barack Obama were on the other side) getting shot. Red ropes mean serious business.

Alex crosses the rope, obviously, and it's an act with consequences. There are the silly ones, like the way the Society punishes her by making her hold a mug of water above her head (there is some genuine cruelty in the Society, but Kress' treatment of them is pitch-perfect in opening that up as an avenue for absurdity), but it's also a big factor in her quest to rescue Mr. Underwood, and people die in that enterprise (none of that is Alex's fault, really, but neither is she entirely blameless, and Kress does a really good job of exploring how responsibility and consequence are problems with solutions—our actions and intensions—that aren't always easy or clear or even clean, and in fact I wish more authors who write for adults would take some time to tease out those issues). There are so many things intertwined with the Society and that red rope. Authority doesn't separate good people from bad, symbols and boundaries are not absolute, but nor should they be addressed lightly, etc.

Anyway, I'm going on and on about things like growing and learning and all sorts of subtext and whatnot, perhaps a bit more than is proper (I really don't have a handle on the critical language to deal with books for young people), but I did see a lot of subtext. Alex and the Ironic Gentleman (the Ironic Gentleman is the name of (modern pirate) Steele's ship, and it turns out to be such a great name, and fans of Patrick O'Brian and other sea stories will find Kress' attention to nautical detail a pleasant surprise) is rich and dense, but it's also just super fun. I mean, yes, I found all these wonderful ideas in it that are about childhood and adults and so on, but it's not like they were wedged in there or even necessarily in there in a conscious way. Kress' first novel really is, first and foremost, a very entertaining adventure story that gets harder to put down the further into it you get. I've already got Timothy and the Dragon's Gate on hold at the library.

David, the narrator of Five Days Apart, is described on the dust jacket as "bright but tongue-tied," but I think that's a little optimistic. For most of the first half of the book it seems more like David has some sort of disorder, like a mild form of Asperger's Syndrome. His awkwardness isn't just outward facing; it's internalized as depression and paranoia. David meets Camille at a party and falls for her pretty much instantly, but he doesn't have the confidence or the social skills to engage with her, so he asks his charismatic friend Alex to help break the ice. The ice is broken, but not for David, and Alex and Camille begin what turns out to be the first serious romantic relationship of Alex's life. A devastated David can't cope, and breaks off the friendship, throwing himself into his work.

So here's the thing: Alex getting involved with Camille is kind of a dick move, because when your best friend asks you for help, especially help of that nature, you either help or don't help. What you absolutely do not do, is date the woman your best friend is interested in. Total dick move. But at the same time, David is unreasonably jealous and possessive, especially since he's not willing to make any sort of an effort to connect with the woman he wants a relationship with. He has a right to feel hurt (not because he has a right to her affection, but because he has a right to his friend's loyalty), but ending the friendship and retreating so far into himself just feels childish.

The whole structure of the novel seems to hinge on feeling sympathy for David, but in the first half of the novel he mostly just comes across as creepy. When Alex and Camille start to have problems he does his best to undermine their relationship without looking like that's what he's doing. David goes on a trip, and he has some experiences that lead to personal revelations that he seems to process as though under water. After that he becomes easier to relate to, but the decisions he makes aren't really any better. He does eventually get to know Camille for who she is, which is certainly progress from keeping her at a distance and behaving like he has a right to her affection. It's a weird assessment to make, but here's how Five Days Apart breaks down: the opening of the book is slow, irritating, and dull, the middle isn't much better, and then miraculously the ending is really, really strong, with subtle and authentic emotional inquiry. It was just too little, too late.

There are books that are so good you find it nearly impossible to put them down. You stay up late, take extra trips to the washroom at work, and even when you do finally manage to put them down for a while, they are easy to slide back into when you do pick them up again. And then there are books that are every bit as good, but are also dense or difficult or not very fast paced, and even though they are amazing and hard to put down, they're also very hard to pick back up again because of that density or what have you. The Ambassador is the second kind of book; absolutely brilliant, but it makes demands on the reader, and can be difficult to get into again once you actually manage to tear yourself away so you can go to work or what have you. Which, you know, is why it took me more than four months to read it, even though I loved every page.

Sturla Jón Jónsson is a poet with a new book out, and because this isn't a fantasy novel, he also has a day job as a building superintendent, where the tenants have no inkling of his literary career. He gets invited to a poetry festival in Lithuania as the Icelandic representative. Before leaving for Lithuania, Sturla spends an exorbitant amount of money on a fine coat, which is promptly stolen upon his arrival. Sturla is outraged by the affront, but he has ethical problems of his own to worry about. While at the festival, a newspaper in Iceland publicly accuses him of plagiarizing the poems in his new book from an unpublished manuscript written years earlier by his dead cousin Jónas.

Long-time readers of this blog—assuming there are any—will remember that I absolutely adored The Pets (also published by Open Letter; my review here), which as far as I know is the only other book of Ólafsson's to be translated into English. The Ambassador is every bit as good, but it's also entirely different. The Pets was abrupt and intense, while The Ambassador is slow and sprawling, though it eventually comes to rely on the same kind of tension, as Strurla's bad choices—and his inability to see them as bad choices—threatens to unravel his life. Additionally, Lytton Smith's translation is smooth and graceful, with a Nabokovian alienness to it, an elegance and precision that brings with it a hint of the foreign.

I'm not punk, or indie, or anything like that. There's aspects of those cultures, or counter-cultures I guess (same thing, really), that I feel an affinity for, but they're not really my scene. Indie culture is what Broken Pencil does, though, and therefore you're not going to find much in the way of mainstream fiction in Can'tLit, and anthology of fiction from the magazine. That's both awesome and frustrating.

There's two ways to think of taking risks in fiction. There's the obvious way, which is writing against mainstream literary expectations, and I have a lot of respect for that, especially when it's done here in Canada, because, well... yeah. CanLit can be boring and predictable as shit sometimes. Maybe even most of the time. (Rosenbaum's foreword even starts with the words: "CanLit sucks.") There's a whole bunch of that in this collection; in point of fact most of the pieces could fall under that heading. Then there's the other way, which is when an author writes against or outside of their comfort zone, and that's a harder thing to do (and gets a hell of a lot more respect from me), and harder to determine from an anthology. The only person represented in this anthology whose work I've read before (aside from Hal Niedzviecki, who only wrote an introduction) is Zoe Whittall, and I don't feel like I've read enough of her work to make a determination on that front.

Anyway, there are some great stories here, in particular "Amsterdam at Midnight," which was very atmospheric, and though I can't speak for that particular city, really captured being tired and awake and aimless in an urban landscape at night, that kind of echoey darkness, the cool stillness with the occasional flush of humidity. And then you've got Joey Comeau's great "Giraffes and Everything," which brings with it an unexpectedly dark catharsis, and Christopher Willard's "Little Wite Squirel Angel," which at first I kind of hated, because it stuck me as plucking at satirical low-hanging fruit, but then won me over as it became less an expression of class contempt and more an argument about media repositioning itself in our lives, and the class implications of that.

But in any anthology of forty-seven stories, they aren't all going to be brilliant. And some of them really weren't. There were several (I'm looking at you, "Dandruff") that seemed kind of pointless, like someone said to themselves, "okay, stories are supposed to do X, so I'm going to do Y, even though Y doesn't really make any sense and is kind of dull and meaningless." In a sense that's a stereotype of the punk ethos, and though one tries to avoid thinking in stereotypes, it's hard to avoid with some of these stories.

Overall I enjoyed Can'tLit, and got to read some really daring stuff, but to be honest some of it felt like filler, present for attitude rather than quality. (In retrospect, that may have been part of the point; even the dimensions of the book are just unusual enough to be awkward.) The cover is gorgeous, though.

Can'tLit was my thirteenth and final selection for the Fourth Canadian Book Challenge.

So here we have another gorgeous book. This is a thing that CZP does, create beautiful books that is, a logical consequence of hiring Erik Mohr to design covers, and the picture that I have posted here does not do it justice (it includes spot varnish!). Creepy in an awesome kind of way, yeah? Anyway.

The World More Full of Weeping is only about eighty pages, so I don't know whether to call it a novella or a short novel, but I don't care, because it's really good. There's also a short essay on the psychogeography of his work in the back that actually stands on its own, so, you know, bit of a bonus there.

I loved Bedtime Story, and really enjoyed Before I Wake, but I think The World More Full of Weeping is my favourite of his books. The central concern of Wiersema's work is families in crisis while children are in jeopardy, and this is no exception. Brian Page goes wandering in the woods behind his father's house with a young girl named Carly, and together they explore the Forest. I put this in capital letters because it's not the just forests of rural British Columbia, but all forests, a kind of Platonic ideal of what a forest should be, a never ending green, lush and misty and dappled and with birds and flowers and streams. One day Brian just doesn't come home, and while they search for him, his father learns that he too disappeared into the Forest when he was young, and has blocked the memory.

When I was a young boy, a very young boy (we're talking maybe five years old at the most), I had a recurring dream. Sometimes it comes back to me when the sleep is deep enough and my life is in turmoil. In this dream I'm running through the aisles of the old IGA in my hometown, the one that burned when I was still in grade school. I was pursuing—and being pursued by, in a kind of game—a young woman whose face I never quite saw. I loved this girl like a mad person, and to this day I still do, and I feel it down in my bones, like an echo reverberating through my life and relationships. The iconography of my dreams made her out to be a kind of Fae woman, and here's where we get to the part that's actually applicable to The World More Full of Weeping: Brian's relationship with Carly reminded me so much of the way this dream infiltrated my life over the years it was more than a little... I don't even know what it was. Just kind of unsettling, but in a really good way.

The World More Full of Weeping was my twelfth selection for the Fourth Canadian Book Challenge.

I'd passed Before I Wake in the bookstore umpteen million times, and it itched at me, as books do, but I passed it by. If you read the copy on the back of the book, it will tell you that young Sherry Berrett gets struck by a car and falls into a coma (yes, Robert, a coma, not a catatonic state—fool me once, etc). Her parents eventually make the heart-breaking decision to take her off life support, and then—when she doesn't die—there's all sorts of talk about miracles and whatnot. At the time I was walking past Before I Wake in the bookstore I had a "no Jesus" policy. A friend and I had been talking, and we noticed that in the popular media—television in particular—religion seemed to be tacked on to everything, whether it needed it or not, and particularly a sort of lukewarm, non-committal Christianity. Regardless of whether or not this actually describes Wiersema's book (and it doesn't), that's what was going through my head when I read the word miracle. I finally picked it up because Quill & Quire had asked me to review his latest novel, Bedtime Story (review here), and I wanted to get a handle on his previous work.

It's not often I make a positive comparison to Stephen King. The man is sometimes a great storyteller, but he long ago became more of a commercial entity than anything else, and I want to make it clear that I'm talking about King back when he was merely a famous writer and a not a franchise. Anyway: onward.

Wiersema writes in a very clear, straightforward voice that does its damnedest to get out of the way of the story and the characters without ever succumbing to the airport-bestseller sloppiness that such a style can sometimes slide into. Before I Wake was an engrossing, King-ish page-turner (I think I read it in just two sittings) that actually made me care about the characters. Simon and Karen Barrett's pain felt genuine and they never devolved into engines of grief (a phrase I stole from a review of the season finale of The Killing that I can no longer find the link to), and the big surprise was how much I began to sympathize with Henry, the driver who struck down Sherry. Henry enters a kind of shadowy world of lost people reminiscent of London Below from Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, but less magical and more genuinely disturbing. I won't spoil it for you, but there was just the right amount of Jesus to make everything fit together nicely.

Before I Wake was my eleventh selection for the Fourth Canadian Book Challenge.

I read The Waterproof Bible so long ago now that it feels like forever, but it's so good, and since I'm already behind schedule anyway, I thought, fuck it, let's write about it. I sprung for the hardcover, which I almost never do, but in this case it was worth it. Rather than your typical big-publisher hardback with an undistinguished cloth cover and a dust jacket with a pretty picture that will get ignored or damaged or lost, Random House made something that looks like the kind of thing McSweeney's would have put together, with some really lovely gold leaf and a clever belly band that's actually thematically relevant. The stock isn't quite as good as what McSweeney's would have used, but then McSweeney's would have charged an additional ten bills for it, too. Anyway, the thing is gorgeous.

This is the bit where I'm supposed to tell you what the book is about, and who Kaufman is, and things like that. All I know about Kaufman is that he's written a couple of novellas (All My Friends Are Superheroes, in 2003, and The Tiny Wife, in 2010) and that he's got a Twitter account. And really, that's enough, yeah? So the book: The Waterproof Bible is about some extraordinary people who are also incredibly ordinary. Or something. It's about a frog driving a car, who is not really a frog, but is really driving a car. It's about a woman who projects her emotions into the world in the most literal of ways, and who protects herself and her memories with talismans. It's about a man building a boat in the middle of the prairie, and it's about some people—also not really frogs—who live under the sea, and about people who can call down the rain. The way I see it, you've got two ways to go: you can be intrigued by this information, as I was, or you can not be intrigued by this information, and let one of the most enjoyable reading experiences of the last two years fly right on by. It's up to you, really. And by that I mean shut up and buy the book.

It's really, really tempting to read The Waterproof Bible as an allegory, or collection of allegories or extended metaphors or something. Kaufman invites the reader in, with Rebecca and her emoting in particular, and he makes you want to try on their circumstances like a suit, to see how they fit and where things line up, and to see what that tells you about yourself. They won't fit. You can understand Aby's crisis of faith, or Lewis' revelations, but no matter what angle you choose to approach them from, they're never going to be able to say anything about your own faith directly. What they will do is nag at you and make you dig deeper and make you look at yourself and think about things and ask questions you maybe didn't know were yours for the asking. I found this to be particularly true when reading about Rebecca, her dead sister Lisa, and Stewart, who stayed out there in the drought and waited for Rebecca and the storm.

Kaufman will do all these things, and you won't even know it's happening, because The Waterproof Bible reads like a light, mostly comic romp. It doesn't feel like this big weighty thing that will command feelings to rise up from the bottom of wherever to stir up some silt, it feels like the kind of book you'll take the to the beach to read in an afternoon with a glass of zinfandel and some wasabi peas, chuckling softly to yourself at the funny bits. That's what I did. Well, not really what I did; my life doesn't look anything like that. I read it in a damp basement with some music on, a glass of Coke, and some Creamy Dill Old Dutch potato chips, but you get the idea.

The Waterproof Bible was my tenth selection for the Fourth Canadian Reading Challenge.