I’ve been chastised and persecuted and ridiculed in public to the point where I have to go underground in order to practice a ritual that is so frowned upon by society I dare not reveal it to anyone…

…ok, maybe to you.

Here it goes…

I don’t read novels the same way most people do.

Friends have screamed,”but you ruin the ending that way!” ” Why would you do that? That is not how you’re supposed to read a book!” ” It’s just wrong!” ” You’re a freak!” And I am not giving way to melodrama here…these are direct quotes, most of them from loved ones.

Granted I am the type of personality that hates surprises. When I was a kid, and Mom and Dad where out, I’d search the house high and low to find my Christmas gifts. And I don’t particularly like going to movies because I can’t skip ahead or fast forward to the end of the movie, watch the resolution, then rewind the flick back to where I left off.

I much prefer DVD’s for this reason.

When I start a book I don’t just flip to the first page of the first chapter. Rather my reading ritual is to scour all the publication or newspaper acccolades (snippets that are listed on the first page or two of some books, or sometimes grace the back cover). I’m not sure why I want to know other opinions before I come to my own but if one of the accolades is from an author I admire, I’m more likely to purchase the HARDCOVER of the intended book. I then usually read any author information, or book club or readers club suggested questions and answers if they are included in the publication. Finally I read the interview with the author at the back of the book if there happens to be one.

Then, and only then, do I settle in and read the first quarter or first third of a novel. Next I flip to the back and read the ending. Now I don’t just leave it at that. I DO go back and continue from where I left off. I do have a genuine interest in seeing how the author gets to his final plot destination.

Who’s to say an author’s true intent is to have his or her novel read from front to back, beginning to end, following the story in order of the page numbers?

I’d like to think I do this is because I enjoy the journey of the read as well as the destination. There have been a couple of books where skipping to the end has given me NO clues to the resolution of plot. “Boys in Trees”  by Mary Swan being one and “Four Letters of Love” by Niall Williams being the other and I still enjoyed both immensely.

Is there a proper way to read a book?

Harold Bloom writes in the preface of his book How to Read and Why : “There is no single way to read well, though there is a prime reason why we should read… Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in friends, or in those who may become friends. Imaginative literature is otherness and as such alleviates loneliness.”

To me, reading a novel has become almost ritualistic. A comforting routine that allows me, as Bloom suggests, solitude without loneliness.

What is your reading ritual?

Books are love letters (or apologies) passed between us, adding a layer of conversation beyond our spoken words.” 
― Donalyn Miller, The Book Whisperer: Awakening the Inner Reader in Every Child

I started a book club over ten years ago and although members have come and gone over the years

there has been a core of five that have suffered and celebrated life events over the magic of prose.

Our group is now made up of 10 and we’ve become a bit of an institution of sorts.   I am often asked “what is your book club reading this year?” and so I thought I’d share our entire list with all of you who are curious.

How did we come up with this eclectic array of titles?

Simple.

We all meet in September with books that we’ve read and loved,

or want to read but haven’t had time,

or have heard about and are curious….

or are scared to read alone for fear of frustration.

Then we are all given 10 votes (with the intention of meeting 9 or 10 times throughout the year) and we can put out ten votes on the books we so choose; one vote on ten books, or two votes on five books ….

I once wanted to read certain specific book so badly I put my entire ten votes on that one book! (much to the chagrin of several members…but they humoured me.)

This year we have everything from true crime to young adult, science fiction to literary classics.  We also have an honourable mention list for those titles who didn’t quite make the cut.

Enjoy!  And let me know if you’ve read any of these.  What did you think?  Which is your favourite?

2013/14 Book Club Reading List

The Winners

October: Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card @ Leanne’s house Oct. 23

November: The Purchase – Linda Spalding

December: Persuasion – Jane Austen and

Life After Life – Kate Atkinson

January: Z: A novel of Zelda Fitzgerald – Therese Anne Fowler

February: Unwind – Neal Shusterman

March: Helter Skelter – Vincent Bugliosi

April: A Trick of the Light – Louise Penny

May: Cutting for Stone – Abraham Verghese

June: The Forgotten Garden – Kate Morton

Honourable Mentions

Pure – Julianna Baggott

Two Solitudes

The Orphan Master’s Son – Adam Johnson

Police – Jo Nesbo

The Empress Dowager Cixi – Jung Chang

The Lion Seeker – Kenneth Bonert

Reconstructing Amelia

The Absolutist

Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Arcadia – Lauren Groff

The Winter Palace – Eva Stachniak

The Lollipop Shoes – Joanne Harris

And the Mountains Echoed – Khaled Husseini

The Language of Flowers – Vanessa Diffenbaugh

The Little Giant of Aberdeen County – Tiffany Baker

The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

Light Between Oceans – M.L. Stedman

The 100 Year Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared – Jonas Jonasson

The Juggler’s Children – Carolyn Abraham

Game of Thrones

Tomorrow I will get my English students to pick a passage out of “The Stone Carvers”, one they found particularly profound or poetic, and then respond to it personally.  This is one I wrote to use as an exemplar.  If they are brave enough I will have them post their responses in the comment section…and they are brave and brilliant little lightbulbs so I know they will!

“…[Klara] began to believe that, like the fog that was everywhere except indoors, she was not really inside the house of her mind.  Or perhaps it was that unlike the fog she was in that house and nowhere else.  She decided then to let the outside atmosphere into her rooms, and she opened every window, every door, and watched the white, odourless smoke crawl over the threshold and sill, curl around the legs of chairs, and spread itself over tables and beds.  She unlatched cupboard and closet doors and pulled open drawers in various dressers so that the fog touched even her most intimate underclothes and crept around her dead mother’s good dishes.”  The Stone Carvers by Jane Urquhart.  pg. 32.

Have you ever felt like Klara?  Like you weren’t inhabiting your own mind

or living in your own body?

Where you’ve felt too exhausted to engage in your own life or too traumatized to emotionally invest in your own experiences?  So you’ve severed yourself from the reality of your situation and have merely shifted into perfunctory actions,

neurons and synapses firing

(but it seems as though not of your own accord).

So,

you need some sort of invasive force to permeate your being, your space even

(metaphorically)

to tangibly weave and insinuate itself into and around your being  just to prove that you exist.  That you actually do live

and breathe

and walk

and think

and be.

That it is you taking up space and oxygen in a room.

That you consume rather than are consumed.

I get Klara.  I understand why she needs the fog as a manifestation of her confusion- a visual of her “blurred” state.  Making thoughts that are too scrambled and vague to make sense

visible.

Even if it’s absurdly vulnerable in nature.

But what to do when there is no fog.  No natural phenomenon to serve as words to your thoughts?

Do you just sit in confusion until you can claw your way through and serve as your own catalyst

jarring you from your inertia?

Or do you speak or draw or create or cry?

Or wait?

For something.

Or someone.

As ethereal as fog.