hello again. nothing like sitting at a computer on your extra day off work, but hey, what are holidays for?! Sorry about the lack of house updates - i just haven't had the time to head up to the NW with my camera. As of last tuesday, we had a full foundation, sealed and painted black, with an electric and gas meter. wooo! trust me - it's delux :) other houses in the pod had piles of wood infront of them to start framing, and they seem to be a week ahead of ours, so finger's crossed, next week i'll post a photo of a partially framed house. wicked.
on a different note, i've been reading a bunch lately. mostly it started with heading up to a rig site where i had to share a trailer with the safety guy and had no internet connection. I fully recommend reading Annie Proulx while surrounded by men. That newfoundland woman can write about texan and montanan men like nobody's business! I was happily surprised to find That Old Ace in the Hole at the Safeway in Fort St. John (FSJ from now on). I also read Miriam Toews A Complicated Kindness and A Boy of Good Breeding - both from the FSJ Safeway as well. I didn't have the guts to ask the men on site if the descriptions and characters these women write about burly men are true to form, but they sure seem bang on to me (though a bit more comedic/tragic than reality). If anyone wants to email me to recommend more novels in this similar vein, I'm likely headed up to FSJ again in a week or two and need some literary sustenance. It may seem presumptuous, but i tend to think of these stories in the Steinbeck, Abbey, Beat Poets sort of realm, but written by women. I really like the 'drunk yet sensible man who doesn't take shit' sort of characters.
SInce getting home last sunday night, I have been hit with a cold. Being hit with a cold sends me flying to one specific place - the public library. If you're looking for a quick read without much to get your teeth into, I recommed A Perfect Manhattan by Leanne Shear and Tracey Toomey. Team written by writer/actresses, somewhat autobiographical about a bartender-lady and her coctail waitress friend getting great paying gigs in the hamptons and spending all their cash on fancy dresses and channel sunglasses. I hope to god this book still falls in the realm of Fiction! I know that many people really are this shallow, but i like my fiction to be, well, a bit more fictional... not so much like reality t.v. on paper.
After that day of reading I moved on to Julie Johnston's As If By Accident. A wonderful novel, particularly for any of you who know a woman in her 50's in toronto living on her own (just like the protagonist). Not that i've ever been a woman in her 50's living alone in toronto, but the character seems bang on to me. And there are awsome plot twists, excellent geographical descriptions and even a few questions left unsolved at the end for the reader to mull over. Very rare these days. It ties almost everything up into a nice satistying package, but not just quite. Excellent. The difference between a best selling american novel (A Perfect Manhattan) and a Canadian Govenor-General award wining author's first novel for adults (J.Johnston won the GG for children's work) is stunning. Can i really be this smug about being a canadian? Are we really just so immensely superior in our fiction?
Today I started Julie & Julia by Julie Powell, which has gotten alot of coverage in the Globe and Mail and other such cultural touchstones. First 80 pages in - it's o.k. I has a bit of the "woe-is-me, i'm a reasonably sucessful woman in her late twenties in NYC and i don't know what to do with my life" that seems to sell these days (see above - A Perfect Manhattan), but the contrast with french cooking, Julia Child, emergence and awareness of suburban women in the 60's and 70's and the continual smei-professional struggle sort of sets it apart. I'm 99% positive that Ms. Powell's life is going to go along perfectly fine at the end. I'll report back once i'm done. The whole 9/11 tie-in seems one too many issues piled on at the momment but maybe the thread really will get through to pull them all together. Though after this I think i'll really need to read a book written by a man! and hopefully something international to get me out of this pulp-american vs. intelligent and critical canadian competition i seem to have going.... :)
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