If you know me even a little bit then you probably know I love books. Just about anything I can get my hands on I'll read. Fiction, non-fiction and just about everything in between. I love exchanging book titles with people, tastes don't always match up but I've found some real gems on the recommendations of people I talked to in the lineup at the post office.

My current reading list


Girlfriend in a coma by Douglas Coupland. note: It really irritates me, but the cover on amazon.com is not the same cover of the edition I have. Mine is prettier. I was introduced to Coupland's work over the summer by a colleague at work and I am completely in love with his writing style. He's been compared to Stephen King, Kurt Vonnegut, and John Bunyan. His novels are typically set in the Vancouver suburbs in the 1970s-90s. His writing is witty and dry and his characters are all so beautifully flawed.

She provided the idea that some frail essence from a now long-vanished era still existed, that the brutality and extremes of the modern world were not the way the world ought to be - a world of gentle Pacific rains, down-filled jackets, bitter red wine in goatskins, and naive charms.

Because I always knew you had to be willin to die to even do this job. That was always true. If you aint they'll know it. They'll see it in a heartbeat. I think it is more like what you are willin to become. And I think a man would have to put his soul at hazard. And I wont do that. I think now that maybe I never would.

The dreams of early sailors in the western Atlantic must have been haunted by the memory of the Outer Banks strewn with the broken ribs of shipwrecks. When the sailors returned to their home ports in Europe, colonial map-makers listened to their tales and embellished charts of the islands with ferocious dragons, sea monsters, and sunken ships. The Outer Banks were, and are, a long ribbon of narrow, windswept islands rimming the North Carolina coastline and strecthing forty miles into the sea.

Last week it came up in a comment to rei_c how much I have been missing academia and the geeky pleasures of research and spending hours in the library accompanied only by stacks of books, sharpened pencils, a legal notepad and my i-pod. So when I heard about a lecture given by Irish writer Colm Tóibín hosted at the university I attended until last year I was really excited. Really. I love academic lectures anyway, but I have always loved listening to authors discuss their writing and their methods and just about anything, a throw back to the days when I thought for sure I'd be published by the time I was thirty.

Moving on. Tóibín, complete with Irish brogue and little red glasses, was a real delight. He is modest and funny and completely disarming. And he did two readings, one a short story from his collection Mothers and Sons and the second a chapter from his upcoming book, Brooklyn. I loved listening to where he put emphasis (and how he tried to mimic the voice of an eighty year old woman) and the dialogue, which was amazing. I was rapt the whole two hours, and I didn't even care that the woman in the metallic track suit next to me kept her elbow in my side the whole time.

I am currently reading The Master, a novel about the writer Henry James and though I am only fifty pages in I would definitely recommend it to anyone.

He covered his face for a moment when he remembered one second in the dream which had caused him to wake abruptly. He would have given anything now to forget it, to prevent it from following him into the day: in that square he had locked eyes with his mother, and her gaze was full of panic, her mouth ready to cry out. She fiercely wanted something beyond her reach, which she could not obtain, and he could not help her. - pg.3

He wished he had demanded a seat at the end of a row. In his allotted place he was enclosed, and, as the curtain rose, and the audience began to laugh at lines he thought crude and clumsy, he felt under siege. He did not laugh once; he thought not a moment was funny, but more importantly, he thought not a moment was true. Every line, every scene was acted out as though silliness were a higher manifestation of truth. - pg. 15