2015 books: 13-16

[the_siobhan]

    

Wilderness Tips by Margaret Atwood The inside cover says I bought this 1991. It's a collection of short stories, mostly about people having affairs. The Wiki article says that the stories are primarily based on Atwood's contemporaries, which is actually kind of scary. Do not get on her bad side, people.

    

Other Solitudes: Canadian Multicultural Fictions edited by Linda Hutcheon and Marion Richmond. The inside cover says 1993. I got this for a class I was taking at the time. It's a collection of short stories written by Canadian writers who are immigrants or the children of immigrants. Each story is followed by an interview with the writer where they talk about their experiences and perspective of being a newcomer to Canada. The writers come from all over the world, so the stories are fascinating both in their similarities and their differences. If I had any complaint at all it would be about the sameness of tone from one story to the next - but since they are all describing the same experience, it's not all that surprising.

    

Last Summer at Barebones by Diane Mason Once upon a time I when dinosaurs roamed the earth I joined a bulletin board. It happens to be where I first encountered Usenet, but I also joined a local group for writers. We talked about everything except writing, got together for coffee, went to readings, and went to Word On The Street and the Eden Mills Writer Festival. And that's how I ended up meeting BC. Diane was probably the most prolific member of the group - she always seemed to have an article or a short story showing up in a magazine somewhere. She is also articulate and acerbic and both of those things really come out in her book. The story is about a young woman named Dee growing up in the 70s. The Barebones of the title is the name of a Lake where her family rents a cottage every summer. Dee is both fat and a bit of social misfit and her thin and popular older sister tortures her - "for her own good" of course. The story is told after an adult Dee sees her sister under the most unlikely circumstances ever, and her past all comes flooding back to her.

At the time I first read the book I told Diane that my only problem with it was that there are no sympathetic characters. In hindsight it's actually all about my own issues around unhappy childhoods, so if you don't have that particular trigger you would probably love this.

    

Love Object by Sally Cooper Another member of the defunct writer's group. The story of a young woman named Mercy whose mother who is institutionalized for mental illness and her father who disappears into his own grief. The daughter and her brother stumble through adolescence isolated and alienated. Sally's writing is full of evocative little details, like Mercy wearing underwear that is too small because nobody notices that she's grown out of it. I blame these people for the fact I never let anybody see my own writing outside of Nadruwrini. They're too damn good at it.

These are all the Canuck writers I could find to this point, but they probably aren't really the last. I wouldn't be surprised if I have a few more Findleys or Atwoods lurking among the stacks.