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Cities. Mine, and yours.
Sep. 3rd, 2009 11:45 pmThis has not been a good week. Hell, this has not been a good three weeks. But that is not what I am here to talk about. What I am here to talk about is this:
( This year's books, so far... )
#46 -- Maggie Helwig, Girls Fall Down (in progress)
I'm not even finished this one yet, but. But. I am blowing off three genre books, one by a very good friend, for this little literary edge-of-fabulism thingie printed on lovely ridged paper, and doing it gladly.
Thing is, this is one of those times where I'm not sure my total fatuous love for a book actually translates into a recommendation.
Someone recommended me Maggie Helwig, and I think it was either for the prose style or the feminist threads running through. Neither of these things are why I am in love with this book. Why I am in love with this book is because it is set in my Toronto, which is very different from the Toronto next door or that of someone who lives across town. I recognize the houses in it on description, bits of Kensington or Bathurst and College (![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
dolphin__girl, there's a whole half-chapter down the street from your old place). I can trace the landmarks, and her landmarks are to a certain degree also my landmarks; our important places, the ones that actually make a person's city, overlap. I keep chuckling just a little, and it's with recognition.
This is a book about my city. And, well. That doesn't translate unless we have the same city too.
But for me, at least, this is like rereading parts of Minus Time (which I did this week) or the first section of In the Skin of a Lion or parts of Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask or even Ellen/Elena/Luna, which I haven't reread in years. It's like finding someone else in the secret club of people who somehow, without ever meeting, inhabit the same space; are passing through the rest of the world just a little out of phase, but out of phase on the same frequency, so you can see each other solid as you walk by.
It's like coming home.
I really need to write more of the Toronto stories sitting half-outlined on my hard drive.
( This year's books, so far... )
#46 -- Maggie Helwig, Girls Fall Down (in progress)
I'm not even finished this one yet, but. But. I am blowing off three genre books, one by a very good friend, for this little literary edge-of-fabulism thingie printed on lovely ridged paper, and doing it gladly.
Thing is, this is one of those times where I'm not sure my total fatuous love for a book actually translates into a recommendation.
Someone recommended me Maggie Helwig, and I think it was either for the prose style or the feminist threads running through. Neither of these things are why I am in love with this book. Why I am in love with this book is because it is set in my Toronto, which is very different from the Toronto next door or that of someone who lives across town. I recognize the houses in it on description, bits of Kensington or Bathurst and College (
dolphin__girl, there's a whole half-chapter down the street from your old place). I can trace the landmarks, and her landmarks are to a certain degree also my landmarks; our important places, the ones that actually make a person's city, overlap. I keep chuckling just a little, and it's with recognition.This is a book about my city. And, well. That doesn't translate unless we have the same city too.
But for me, at least, this is like rereading parts of Minus Time (which I did this week) or the first section of In the Skin of a Lion or parts of Flyboy Action Figure Comes With Gasmask or even Ellen/Elena/Luna, which I haven't reread in years. It's like finding someone else in the secret club of people who somehow, without ever meeting, inhabit the same space; are passing through the rest of the world just a little out of phase, but out of phase on the same frequency, so you can see each other solid as you walk by.
It's like coming home.
I really need to write more of the Toronto stories sitting half-outlined on my hard drive.
