Don't I Know You? | 
Always love these 😊
❤Red
💙 Will always be a summer baby, although I love the way fall smells
❤Thriller/Horror
💙Besides reading? Definitely baking
❤Nachos or chocolate covered pretzels...and I'm off both right now 😔
💙Huge Diet Pepsi addict. I'm not proud of it
❤Toss up between my throw pillows and my pictures
💙Hmmm @PurpleyPumpkin You're it!
#gettingtoknowyou
@Tiffy_Reads
I'm happy to see Jackson's smart and funny novel on the longlist for the Leacock medal for humour: https://leacock.ca/2017/04/25/announcing-2017-leacock-medal-longlist/
If it snows overnight, the silence in the early morning has a different quality, as if a duvet has fallen over the city. I lay there wondering how deep it was. Then I heard the scrape of a shovel, like winter clearing its throat.
Aipalovik has been to Sundance (where he was cast as an indigenous zombie in the horror movie Inukshuk) but never to the south of France. He used to work as a driver on one of those polar-bear-viewing buses for tourists, and before that he hunted caribou. So the empty white spaces of travel are familiar to him.
Rose felt lucky to have landed somewhere with friendly editors who indulged her ideas and still cared about commas. But it wouldn't last. A job in print journalism was soon going to be like working as a blacksmith, or a calligrapher. Sixty people had been laid off at the paper only the month before. Finding Jimi Hendrix alive could save her neck.
I was settled in with a duvet on the porch one night as a ribbon of cool air flowed over me. I could feel the presence of the lake, like a sleeping dog. The call of the loons was so clear and loud, notes breathed into a bamboo instrument.
When you're young, living in a vintage house confers character. You buy some history for yourself. But as you get older, the parallels between your aging house and your own decline can become oppressive. Your life becomes a list of repairs and maintenance. Replace back stoop. Change furnace filter. Book physio.
"Occasionally I will play my own little Casio tunes over the PA," Mr Softee said, "but I like the power of this Gorecki. It's so tidal, so inevitable. It feels like an infection moving up through the body, towards the heart." He smiled.
"Leonard, this song of yours, A Thousand Kisses Deep? It is perfect. It cannot be improved upon," Karl Ove said to him. "Can I ask how long it took to write it?"
"A thousand years, more or less." Leonard rasped. "I write very slowly. I write in geological time."
"We are polar opposites then. My new book is already over 500 pages and the main character is still in utero." Karl Ove laughed at himself. "My publisher begs me to shut up."
"A man who writes honestly about his intimate life is considered brave, but when a woman does, it's called oversharing."
I was surprised by how genuine Bill Murray was. There was a formal kindness about him. Plus, I had only seen him on tv a few times, not enough to be star-struck or tongue-tied. He was no star, yet. Just as I was no writer. We were still in the lobby of our lives.
The curtains reminded me of my childhood in Burlington, in a suburb defined by the whole concept of covered windows, with their mysterious apparatus of gliding tracks, boxy valances, and nylon sheers. A proscenium arch for the theatre of family.
pickInterlinked short stories follow Rose's life from her teens right up to her 70s. In each story, Rose interacts with celebrities, often in mundane circumstances. I laughed out loud (Keith Richards moonlighting as a surgeon) and came close to tears (Leonard Cohen operating an ice cream truck). The canoe trip with Karl Ove Knausgard and Taylor Swift etc was a fitting finale. Smart. Charming.
I do like my new sheets, though. Navy flannel. Part of my positive embrace of winter. And I don't mind the way the gray light enters my room at this time of year in such a diplomatic way, easing me into the day.
"So, if my... tumor turns out to be benign, should I worry about something worse, down the road?"
"Nah, your chances stay the same as anybody else. I think our bodies just like to grow stuff, like mushrooms in the forest - it's their artistic side coming out. Cancer is just creativity run amok."
I would always be a too-accommodating person. People-pleasing on the surface. Underneath, anger-lava.
Sometimes we would stand on the dock with the binoculars, watching him bump over the waves behind Trevor's boat, and think, Bob Dylan is tubing on our lake. It was pretty surreal. But Canadian summers are so short that everything about them feels dreamlike.
But in 1970 the young mistrusted history. We wanted to shed our human past in order to be lighter and more transparent - more like the pop icons of the time: butterflies, rainbows and daisies. We wanted to become innocent, weightless citizens of nature.
"And I'm difficult, I know I am."
"Well, I'm not difficult enough," I said, but she didn't pick up on that. My mood lifted. I began to feel the expansiveness that comes with the company of a smart, frank woman. Joni was just struggling to be herself, to stay herself, and so was I. Maybe there was something even freer than free love.
"How long are you staying?" I asked Joni. I decided that I liked her company. There was something about her that reminded me of home, of Canada. Her complicated, aggressive shyness.
In school they taught us only British or American authors, and I didn't know that such writing, full of snow and longing and places I recognized from my own life, was allowed. The love poems struck me with the force of samizdat, something clandestine and illegal.
Got this in the mail to review and after the last book I need a chuckle or two!
Surprise book happy mail—very well-timed, since my birthday is tomorrow! I won this in a Goodreads giveaway that I'd totally forgotten I entered. I don't know much about this, but the premise sounds interesting, it features an effusive blurb by Katherine Heiny, and the cover is gorgeous!
bailedChronologically arranged, each chapter chronicles an interlude with a different celebrity at a different moment in Rose's life. Yes, these situations are improbable and the novel is built around this one concept, so make sure to suspend disbelief and just go along for the ride... Marni Jackson writes well and this book is sure to please those readers who have a soft spot for pop culture, music, movies, and celebrities. (That's just not me.)
In this chapter, the narrator is hanging out with Bill Murray, circa 1975 (and yes, this is a novel: think Forrest Gump as a young woman hanging out with celebrities for no good reason. Just suspend disbelief and go with it.)
The narrator is currently at a summer writing program taught by a 30-year-old John Updike 😎
Chilling with a burger, a beer, and a new book. Heavenly! (Thanks to @WanderingBookaneer for a lovely dinner!)
Marni Jackson's new fiction is loaded with real people. She read today from a part with a canoe trip that included Leonard Cohen, Taylor Swift and Karl Ove Knausgard. She said her interest in our relationship with celebrity started long ago when she wrote Mother Teresa's dialogue for a wax museum. #VWF16
Devoured the last of a book this morning! Now for another book poolside! Picked this for a little something different!
