Cities. Mine, and yours.

[leahbobet]

This 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:


#1 -- Oscar Wilde, The Happy Prince and Other Stories
#2 -- Ekaterina Sedia, Locomotive to Crimea (in draft)
#3 -- Rudyard Kipling, Just So Stories
#4 -- Chris Coen, Kith and Kin (in draft)
#5 -- Nicholas Christopher, The Bestiary
#6 -- K.J. Parker, Shadow
#7 -- Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman, The Fall of the Kings
#8 -- John M. Ford, The Last Hot Time
Not-#9 -- Helen Oyeyemi, The Icarus Girl
#9 -- Peter S. Beagle, The Innkeeper's Song
#10 -- Claudia Dey, Stunt
#11 -- Sean Stewart, Clouds End
#12 -- Patricia C. Wrede, Searching for Dragons
#13 -- Patricia C. Wrede, Calling on Dragons
#14 -- Madeleine L'Engle, Troubling a Star
#15 -- Scott O'Dell, Sing Down the Moon
#16 -- Patricia C. Wrede, Talking to Dragons
REREAD -- Patricia C. Wrede, Dealing With Dragons
#17 -- Sean Stewart, The Night Watch
REREAD -- Madeleine L'Engle, Dragons in the Waters
#18 -- Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion
#19 -- Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth
#20 -- John M. Ford, The Dragon Waiting
#21 -- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed
#22 -- Lois McMaster Bujold, Brothers in Arms
#23 -- Lois McMaster Bujold, Mirror Dance
#24 -- Lois McMaster Bujold, Komarr
#25 -- Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign
REREAD -- Michael Stackpole, Once a Hero
#26 -- Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That
#27 -- Carrie Vaughn, Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand
#28 -- D.J. Taylor, Bright Young People: The Lost Generation of London's Jazz Age
#29 -- Carrie Vaughn, Kitty Raises Hell
#30 -- Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
#31 -- Mike Carey, Thicker Than Water
#32 -- Lois McMaster Bujold, Falling Free
#33 -- Lois McMaster Bujold, Diplomatic Immunity
#34 -- Alan Bishop and Mark Bostridge, eds., Letters from a Lost Generation: First World War Letters of Vera Brittain and Four Friends
#35 -- Alexander McCall Smith, The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency
Not-#36 -- Samantha Henderson, Heaven's Bones
#36 -- Connie Willis, Remake
#37 -- Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
#38 -- Robert Charles Wilson, Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America
#39 -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
#40 -- Jedediah Berry, The Manual of Detection
#41 -- Lisa Mantchev, Eyes Like Stars
#42 -- China Mieville, The City & the City
#43 -- Merrie Haskell, The Herbalist's Apprentice (in draft)
#44 -- William Gibson, Spook Country
REREAD -- William Goldman, The Princess Bride
REREAD -- Catherine Bush, Minus Time
#45 -- Caitlin R. Kiernan, The Red Tree


#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.

Comments

[c0untmystars.livejournal.com]

I've been in love with many books for many reasons but have yet to come upon one that is set in my Los Angeles. Which is part of the driving force behind The Novel That Needs To Be Rewritten -- the lack of my Los Angeles must be rectified :)

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Yes!

One of these days I need to beat my Toronto Book into shape. Because.

[iampranada.livejournal.com]

I know her father. He's been living in my old neck of the woods on PEI and used to sing in my mother's church choir.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

There are many many books set in Cambridge, but nearly all of them are nothing to do with my Cambridge, because they are all about the university. The rest of the city is just backdrop. The university us splendid and lovely and I enjoyed my time at it, but the city is more than just that. So I love The Cambridge Curry Club, Saumya Balsari, because it tells of the everyday city I live in now.
It's odd living in a famous place. Everyone knows it and has ideas of it. It's hard to know, sometimes, whether what I see here is real at all.

[hysteriachan.livejournal.com]

I read and really enjoyed Girls Fall Down, but mainly I remember it making me horribly, desperately homesick for precisely that reason. I don't think my Toronto and your Toronto are exactly the same (at the very least, mine is much smaller and less well-defined), but I guess it's not surprising that there's some overlap. ^_^

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Yeah, not surprising at all. We were in a lot of the same places for a couple of years there. :)

[(Anonymous)]

I totally get where you're coming from. I've noticed the same phenomenon with music. Even if the song doesn't specifically mention the place I know, I can tell the song writer has been there. Happened to me when I heard Sarah Harmer's "Basement Apartment" and only later found out we'd both lived in the same part of Kingston.

The same way you can "feel" Canada in Gordon Lightfoot's songs.

--Sarah T.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Yeah. :) It's something about the details, and the quality of the light...