Because I’m still buried in print when I’m on the move, here’s talk of the books I’ve been reading en route, while heavier volumes (like Charles Palliser’s The Quincunx and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man) stayed at home.
I read nearly half of this book at the top of the steps between CasaLoma and Spadina House, which is part of an east-west trail traditionally used by Indigenous people along what was once the shoreline of (Great) Lake Ontario: Bob Joseph’s 21 Things You May Not Know about the Indian Act (2018).
In under two hundred pages, there are almost as many years of history covered, with the act considered in detail in under a hundred pages. A central tenet is introduced, with a timeframe (a historical beginning, often still active legislation), a quotation, an explanation, and complicating factors and points of contention (sometimes within and between indigenous groups, sometimes between indigenous communities and the Canadian government): twenty-one times plus five appendices. Succinct, accessible and informative. The fourth appendix includes a list of activities for the classroom and a list of ways to change the world: the sixth is to read books by indigenous authors, so unless you’ve started at the back of the book with that very page, odds are that you’re already changing things.
When the news is getting me down, and I’m anticipating a longer-than-usual commute on the TTC, I pack one of Kiyohiko Azuma’s Yotsuba&! series (14+ volumes) and read a chapter or two between magazine articles or poetry cycles.
But she pulls it off.
Questions that preoccupied me in the beginning (why does she have green hair? where is her mother?) no longer trouble me. Yotsuba goes to the beach or an amusement park (in the thirteenth volume, she goes camping) and when she plays store in the sandbox she makes taiyaki (a pastry filled with red bean paste) in a mold shaped like a fish to “sell”. These are gentle stories, although a young girl facing change remains relevant. As the story progresses, the relationship with the neighbour girls (and their mother) acts like an extended family for Yotsuba, and in the thirteenth volume, we meet her grandmother!
Kim McLarin’s Womanish: A Grown Black Woman Speaks on Love and Life (2019) makes for delightful company in a coffee-shop (fair-trade, of course: slave-trade coffee leaves a bad taste in my mouth), just an essay or two at a time, because there’s so much to consider.
Beginning with an epigraph from Alice Walker’s definition of “womanist”, Kim McLarin’s volume of essays presents the bold and inspiring feminist presence that I hoped to find in Roxane Gay’s work. McLarin waxes her legs and she watches television, but more than anything else, she quotes James Baldwin and makes sense of the world in sentences. Even the shortest pieces are carefully crafted and almost immediately I gave up on note-taking: I was writing out entire paragraphs, then pages. The thirteen essays in Womanish, from “Alright, Cupid” to “Better than the Alternative”, through “The Upside of Loving a Sociopath” and “Mothering While Black” are considered and measured, provocative and engaging, and the quality of the writing is impeccable.
While I prefer print, when I travel I just read electronically via my kindle or kindle app. the big advantage of that is that I have quite a few books on there and I can choose to suit the mood, because like you I do find choosing the right book tricksy.
If I’m just moving around town, I usually have a tote bag and pop in my current read – unless it is really huge. Or, I don’t take a book and use the time to catch up on social media so I can read at home!
When I first got a smart phone, I used to think it was such a wonderful thing to have a single book on it, for when I forgot my “real” book or simply hadn’t brought one because I hadn’t expected to need it: they were always classics and it was so disjointed reading such traditional stories on a device (to say nothing of the fact that the screen was smaller than my palm!) but I loved the idea of it all the same.
I rarely read a book on my phone – it’s either on the kindle or via the kindle app on my iPad. I’ve only read on the iPhone in absolute desperation! I think if you prefer print, the tiny iPhone screen is a step too far! However, my keen reader brother reads quite a bit on his phone. And, as you say, it works in theory!
Womanish sounds so interesting! I used to carry a lot more books with me when I went out but now I rely on my Kindle most of the time.
It’s very good and I would imagine it’s more readily available to you as IG Publishing is an American publisher (out of MYC).
Womanish certainly intruiges me. It sounds like a thoroughly thought provoking read.
It has inspired me to do some research on their other publications: smart and diverse subject matter, fiction and non-fiction alike.
Womanish seems like the kind of book that’d leave you with much to think about over coffee and on your way home, including many brilliant Baldwin quotes. The collection also sounds like it’s written firmly from a mature perspective, for an adult audience already familiar with the subject matter. I find Gay’s essays can sometimes come across as underdeveloped/simple, aimed toward a very broad base of readers, though I did enjoy her memoir Hunger.
It’s also the kind of book that makes you want to write: I think you’d love it. And you do raise a good point, McLarin is quite possibly aiming for a different kind of readership than Gay. Now I see that you’ve rated Hunger a favourite on GR sighs, waffling: you might, yet, convince me to give her another try, but I was feeling that I’d read enough (Untamed State, pieces from Bad Feminist and a couple of short stories).
Hm, you might enjoy Hunger more: the memoir juxtaposes a personal narrative about sexual violence and weight gain against considerations of how overweight women are thought of by society and represented in pop culture. Not sure who Gay thinks of as her intended audience, but I can see how the light essays of Bad Feminist wouldn’t appeal to you, someone who’s incredibly well read and knowledgeable about feminism.
Okay, I’ll give Hunger a try: it sounds like maybe the juxtaposition in that structure might make it more rewarding. (Not right away, I’ll give it some space and read Baldwin in the meantime!) There are definitely some aspects of An Untamed State which I think are worthwhile (and one aspect of the story really did illuminate something about that experience which I hadn’t fully considered) and the plotting in the early chapters is tight, so I do recognize some of what I imagine holds more appeal for devotees, but yes, I was disappointed in the essays. Maybe I was expecting too much. I did not LOVE Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s little primer (book-length essay) on feminism either, but I did think it well written and bold and admirable and all that.
I’ve been really curious abotu the Indian Act book-I love that there is a list of things to do to make things better. It puts the onus back on us settlers to make changes, and it takes the away our ability to just make excuses!
It’s much shorter than I was expecting when I first heard about it. You could easily read it in a single sitting and I think most readers would be shocked at what passes for law here and is actually simple greed through and through.
Good news and bad news… Our library has 21 Things You May not Know (yay!), but it does not have Womanish. But Womanish is still very new, so you never know… especially if I suggest it for purchase! 😉 They both sound excellent.
And the status of the Yotsuba series in your library? I’m sure you meant to check that one first! 🙂
Well, I had to narrow things down a bit… I’m all about control. 😉
When on the go I’ve been popping Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson — linked short stories, many of them only 5-10 pages — into the back of my purse, along with my Kindle. Because you never know when you’ll have time to read! The other week I failed to take along my Kindle as usual, and the woman I was meeting was 20 minutes late. I hardly knew what to do with myself for all that time, just twiddling my thumbs.
I’ve taken Mavis Gallant on a few jaunts too (with the earlier collections, in which the stories were shorter, overall). It’s tremendously satisfying to feel like you’ve actually read an entire “whatever” (story/novella/novel) on a single day’s travels. (It’s rare that I finish an entire book on the move in a single day, but sometimes it happens – with short books. laughs) Denis Johnson is on my list, but I haven’t made it there yet. (Fiction in general, but especially his stories.)
I don’t have a book bag as such but whenever I go to a medical appointment or know I will be somewhere I need to hang around for a bit I do exactly as you do – find a book slim enough to fit in a bag and not too heavy
Sometimes it takes me a ridiculous amount of time to choose a book for a specific journey, especially if it’s appointment-related, because the reading environment can be so tricksy. At times it feels like I spend more time choosing the book than reading it.
Invisible Man and especially Quincunx are books to sprain a wrist with… 😉
And all three of the books in your bag look like quite interesting.
I think I always had the dimensions of H.G. Wells’s Invisible Man in mind rather than Ralph Ellison’s: I was surprised that it’s almost six hundred pages long.
I reread Invisible Man relatively recently–I’d forgotten how long it was until then. I think the first time I read it I just gobbled it up.
Oh, interesting: did you feel like you noticed different parts of the story? I was so engaged in disappointments he faced with various relationships that I imagine I wasn’t paying as much attention to some of the finer points on politics. Also, if you haven’t checked out the stuff on Kanopy about him, via the TPL portal, it’s totally worth a peek.
I was 20 when I first read it & reading a lot of African-American literature for a class with Ntozake Shange. Invisible Man (or Native Son) were the ones that spoke to me the most at that point. It actually felt a bit more heavy-handed to me on this reading; well, I was 20 the first time. Still, it was well worth rereading. I’m sure I knew more about the background issues now than I did then. But as it was 30 (-plus, alas) years since I last read it, I don’t entirely remember what I first noticed anymore, though I do remember being impressed by its rhetorical force.
I hadn’t seen the Ellison things on Kanopy. Thanks! I’ve added them to my watchlist and should see them soon.
Did you go to school in the United States? Or was there a time when she was teaching in Canada? I’ve never read her famous FCGWHCSWRINE, but it’s on my TBR. (It was on a feminist class’s reading list when I was in school, but there were few works by black writers on the curricula when I was studying and none of these chunky classics.)
I can see where IM might have seemed rather direct after one has done more reading on injustice and systemic racism and classism, but I was caught up in the idea of what it meant to literature of the day (thanks to one of those handy Kanopy doc’s) of how ground-breaking it must have been on its publication (and for many years afterwards).
I did go to school in the US–she was teaching at Rice U. in Houston when I was there (early 80s). I’d seen a production of For Colored (hence my spelling…) Girls & was amazed & shortly after that she came to Houston. (One of her sisters lived there if I recall.) It was a great class, but the only English department class I took as an undergraduate, so I don’t know how much other African-American literature they were doing. Over in the Classics department about as close as we got was Augustine…
That’s so interesting. Texas seems like such a long way away. I can see where a notable teacher like that could pull one away from the core subject. And obviously she’s still influencing your reading later in life, if you were interested in rereading. Very cool.
I grew up in Chicago, but my mom was from Texas, and I spent a lot of time there visiting my grandparents & cousins (Dallas area) so while it is a ways even from Chicago, Texas didn’t seem so remote.
I’d love to visit Chicago. Maybe Texas too, but particularly Chicago.
Oh, Womanish sounds excellent out of those three.
It’s the kind of book you want to buy in bulk and pass to your friends.
Absorbing as The Quincux is, I can see why you might want to leave it at home. These three sound just the ticket when interruptions are inevitable.
If I was just carrying my book, I wouldn’t be such a wimp about it, but it’s the book WITH all the other stuff I tote around with me that makes me whine!