I couldn’t believe it… there it was staring out at me from a page of The Globe & Mail… The Royal Wedding for Dummies. One of those yellow Dummies books. All about the royal wedding. Honest.

Author and humanitarian Greg Mortenson is in the news these days. There’s lots of contraversy involving his best selling book Three Cups of Tea. Well, it seems some of it might have been fabricated or inaccurate. What!!… you mean I can’t believe everything I read… shocking! 

I’ve been waiting for ages to read another book by Robert Rotenberg. Remember he wrote that great mystery set in Toronto called Old City Hall. Well apparently I don’t have to wait much longer. His new book, The Guilty Plea, is set to hit bookstores at the beginning of May.  I can’t wait!

From the column Social Studies by Michael Kesterton in The Globe & Mail a wonderful quote:

“When I was 10, I read fairy tales in secret… Now that I am 50 I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things including the fear of childishness.”

British author C.S. Lewis (1898-1963)

Read this daily column if you can find it online. It’s a potpourri of interesting info that is a welcome diversion from all that nasty news out there. And his “Thought du Jour” is always good.

All I can say is … Oh My God!! I stepped into the kitchen and all I heard on the radio was someone saying that Carol Shields was hard to read. And boy, did that ever set me off. So here’s the background to the whole situation. Canada Reads, the annual CBC competition to find the best fiction book in the country is choosing the ”Book of the Decade” this year (an impossible exercise if you ask me, but nobody did). The best novel written in Canada during the past 10 years.  One of the finalists is Carol Shield’s book Unless. And someone actually said Carol Shields was hard to read. Everything else they said after that became white noise – I was so angry I just about lost it.  Let’s get this straight CAROL SHIELDS IS NOT HARD TO READ!!!! What are we becoming – dumb & dumber?? It really irks me to think that we’ve slipped so low on the literary screen that people now consider her hard to read. What’s happening to us?!  Boy, I wish I’d been on that panel to counter that opinion with some common sense. For heaven sakes … even Oprah is recommending Dickens!

Sorry for the rant… I really hope that no one pays any attention to that comment if they heard it. Pick up any Carol Shields book and read it. She won the Pulitzer Prize for The Stone Diaries (she had dual citizenship in Canada & the US that’s how she could win an American prize)… Larry’s Party is an amazing book where the main character is a man and she did an exceptional job with her research on how men feel and what they think about… Happenstance is a really neat story told in the first half of the book from a woman’s perspective, and in the second half from a man’s – same story, just different viewpoints… Swan and The Republic of Love are also wonderful books, and Unless, her last novel before she died, and the one someone on CBC said was hard to read, is probably her best. She was my favourite author, I miss her warm, quirky sense of humour that always shone through her exquisite prose that made you stop and think about what you’d just read. She was an amazing observer of human nature and she wrote about it exceptionally well. If you want to know more about her Google Carol Shields Literary Trust. There’s a wealth of info there to get you immersed in her writing.

Boy, am I ever angry!! Now, what was I doing…

There’s a really interesting article in The Globe & Mail today (Jan. 12th) titled “Book count aims to show that books count. A campaign to add up the number of volumes bought and checked out this week will help form the national literacy strategy.” Here in Canada we view ourselves as readers with only 13% of the population saying they’re non-readers. And according to stats we spend 40 minutes a day with our head buried in a book.

Let’s show them we’re readers… head to the store or your library this week and get a book. The more money put into books and reading the better!

The Tally is in… Canadians bought or borrowed more than 2,500,000 books last week. Book sales amounted to 1,110,568 and the rest were library loans. How’s that for a country with only 33,000,000 people!! This is the country’s first book count and it was organized to draw attention to reading on the eve of the second Reading Summit which is being held in Montreal.

I just heard something really interesting on the radio when I was standing in the kitchen making a batch of cookie dough. Sheila Rogers was chatting with someone whose name I didn’t catch, and one thing they said in that conversation was that short stories are like palate cleansers. They’re perfect to read between novels to clear your mind, especially if you’ve just finished  an exceptionally good book. I never thought of short stories like that, in fact I’m not that fond of them, but I think I’m going to try some and see if this works. Often, if I’ve just finished a really good book I can’t settle on the next book because I can’t get the previous out of my mind. Usually what I have to do is not read anything for a week or so. They recommended Madeleine Thien’s Simple Recipes, and I just happen to have this book, so I’ve plucked it off the shelf and it’s at the ready. … now – must go continue with the cookies…

Way back when I first started this blog I recommended The Brain That Changes Itself  by Norman Doidge.  I just saw it’s still on the best-seller list… 77 weeks later! I told you it was an amazing book.

Well… reading a book on an electronic reader, or I should say attempting to read a book on an electronic reader, was one of the most unpleasant experiences I’ve had in ages. Eventually I just put the thing down and gave up. Even the story, THE Giller Prize winning book The Sentimentalists, couldn’t keep me riveted to that little machine. It probably was not a good choice for me to use for my experiment. I don’t think it’s an easy book to read even in book form. I can’t wait to get a glimpse of it in the store to see what it really looks like. That’s part of my problem I think – I’m a very visual reader. I had many issues with the reader as well as the book. For instance … why would they number the pages according to the chapter (Chapter 1, page 1 of 30 for example)? It’s a very peculiar way I think and I’m curious to know, is this only the way it’s done electronically, or is it like this in the book.  Who knows – it’s nowhere to be found in bookstores! And why would you do it like that? So… will I read a book electronically again – maybe, but I’d have to choose the book very carefully. Not just because it’s not available in REAL book form. That was a mistake on my part.

Congratulations to Johanna Skibsrud. She has won the Giller Prize for her book The Sentimentalists.  There were only 800 copies originally printed and publishers are now printing fast and furious to get books out there for hungry Canadian readers to devour. I am not waiting. I’ve decided to make her book my initiation into electronic book reading. Wish me luck… now where is the darn ”on” button. This may take some getting used to.