Favourite book of your favourite writer.

Oops. I skipped this question, which should have come immediately after I wrote about my favourite writer: Carolyn Slaughter.

I’d have a hard time naming my favourite book by Ms. Slaughter. The Banquet was the novel I discovered first and the book that sent my scurrying to find more of her work.

I am waiting for them to come. I’m not frightened at all. Their coming is the only certainty, so I hold to it.

Thus begins Harold’s story of his relationship with Blossom, a young Marks and Spencer shop girl.

But I also love her novel The Story of the Weasel (also called Relations). And her book Magdalene. Whatever she turns her hand to,  the result is always sublime for me.

Favourite female character.

I loved the characters, Sue and Maude, in Sarah Waters’ phenomenal novel Fingersmith.  The story is told, first from Sue’s point of view and then from Maude’s and it’s hard to imagine loving either of them given the nasty business they’re messed up in. But Waters’ Victorian-era novel is so layered and rich and exciting and the characters so fully-realized and compelling…it’s almost impossible not to empathize with and root for both girls.

I also love Sara Crewe from Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princes.

Of course the greatest power Sara possessed, and the one which gained her even more followers than her luxuries and the fact that she was ‘the show pupil’, the power that Lavinia and certain other girls were most envious of, and at the same time most fascinated by in spite of themselves, was her power of telling stories and making everything she talked about seem like a story, whether it was one or not.

It is Sara’s imagination which sustains her when hope is lost. I admired that quality so much when I was a child, and I still do.

Other female characters I admired: Jo from Little Woman; Francie from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn; Jane Eyre from Jane Eyre; Anne from Anne of Green Gables

The girls from my youth. Girls with spirit and full-hearts and hope.

Favourite male character

What can I say, I love the bad boys. The Heathcliffs and the Rochesters

Jesse from Kristin McCloy’s Velocity:

…he wants me and he is so sure of himself, all I have to do is respond, and I can’t help but respond, he calls everything I am up beneath his fingertips…Your mother wouldn’t like me, huh. I can tell he’s proud of this, that he likes to be considered dangerous. I almost tell him that my mother is dead, but then I don’t. I look at him wondering what my mother would think…surely she would be struck by those eyes. Any woman would. Even a dead woman.

but I also adored Henry from Audrey Niffenegger’s novel The Time Traveler’s Wife. He is so beautifully, tragically, romantic.

I hate to be where she is not, when she is not. And yet, I am always going, and she cannot follow.

I also admired Jack, the narrator of Frederick  Busch’s book Girls. Damaged, ironic, tough and sometimes so funny, Jack is a character who seemed very real to me.

I am not unintelligent. “You are not an unintelligent writer,” my professor wrote on my paper about Nathaniel Hawthorne…He ran into me at dusk one time, when I answered a call about a dead battery and found out it was him… You are not an unintelligent driver, I said.”

Your Favourite Writer

The writer I have most consistently admired over the years is Carolyn Slaughter. Of her eleven published works I have read seven: The Story of the Weasel, Magdalene, Dreams of the Kalahari, The Banquet, A Perfect Woman, The Innocents, and Before the Knife: Memories of an African Childhood. I have two more on my bookshelf (Dresden, Tennessee and A Black Englishman) waiting to be read.

I discovered The Banquet in a second-hand store in Hamilton, Ontario where I was living at the time.

For months Harold watches and admires Blossom before he finds the courage to approach her…

Between them develops a rapport at first exquisite and fragile, and then deepening to a consuming passion. Gradually Blossom realizes that this is forever and that Harold has chosen her for something quite extraordinary. Propelled by an obsession both painful and terrifying, Blossom and Harold are swept towards the affair’s horrifying climax.

Okay, yes, I was going through my obsessive love phase – what twenty-something hasn’t been there, done that? But the quality of Slaughter’s prose was just…so amazingly beautiful. Harold was such a sympathetic character and Blossom so lovely; their story was mesmerizing, right until that shocking ending.

After I read The Banquet I went looking for more of her work and came to discover that she wasn’t so easy to find. I found her novel The Story of the Weasel at The Strand in NYC and devoured it. The story of siblings who fall in love is tragic and perhaps one of the greatest love stories I have ever read. Over the years I’ve tracked down her other work and I have continued to be amazed at the genius of her prose, her understanding of human nature, her fearlessness.

She is the recipient of my one and only fan letter to a writer. I wrote it back in the 80s and she responded: two and a half hand-written pages which I cherish.

Favourite Classic Book

Ah, the classics. Last year our book club decided to have a year of the classics. We’ve been together for just over a decade and thought it would make an interesting experiment as we all, voracious readers though we are, have gaps in our reading, untouched classics that really should be part of our reading experience.We tweaked the criteria a little because some of the members thought that a year of ‘classics’ as we’d been defining it might be a little onerous. Thus, we decided that it had to be a ‘well-known book, published prior to 2000.’

I think my entire book club would agree that the year was a bit of a bust. Reading-wise, that is. I was hoping to revisit some of the classics I’d enjoyed when I was younger, Jane Eyre, perhaps or Wuthering Heights. (Our rule is that you aren’t allowed to choose a book you’ve already read, so I wouldn’t have been able to choose either one of those myself: I picked Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca.) Instead, we sort of had a mish-mash of books as diverse as Zorba the Greek and The Great Gatsby. It was a relief when we started again last month and went back to picking whatever in the hell we wanted.

Despite our rather lackluster year, I still think classics are important. Sure the writing can some times be laborious and the plots slow-moving, but those characters and stories have stood the test of time for a very good reason. As I’ve mentioned before, Jane Eyre  was my first childhood  adult book and I absolutely loved it. But I read it 35 years ago and haven’t read it since. Wuthering Heights is another book which I credit for kick-starting my love of angsty tales of doomed characters. As a teacher I frequently revisit classics like Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird and I understand why these novels are still part of high school curricula. What Canadian female wouldn’t add Anne of Green Gables to her list of beloved classics? A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Anne Frank: Diary of a Young Girl. Little Women.

So, do I have to choose a favourite? Really? Okay – I choose A Little Princess. I’ve read it multiple times. It never fails to make me cry and fill my heart with joy. It’s magical. And Sara Crewe is a character who has stayed with me always. There is nothing about this book I don’t love.

A book you thought you wouldn’t like but ended up loving.

It used to be that I finished every single book I started. I figured I owed it to myself to slog through every book I purchased (and I am a total book-whore, so I own rather than borrow) even those books that just didn’t do it for me. Sometimes I was rewarded for my perseverance and sometimes I wasn’t. I don’t do it much anymore. If I really, really think I should read the book and I start and it’s not grabbing me – I put it aside. At some point, I hope I’ll get back to it. Mostly, though, I don’t. I just have too many books on my tbr shelf (not the virtual one, either, the actual shelves!) and so I don’t labour over books that don’t speak to me pretty quickly.

That said, I have read books that I didn’t initially think would be my cup of tea. Yann Martel’s Life of Pi would be one such book. Just too out there for me. Still, I read it. I enjoyed it. I’m not sure I understood it, but when I was done I felt pretty proud of myself. It was a book club selection a few years back and we had a great discussion about the book. Another book that would fall into this category would be Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, a challenging book that ended up being so powerful and memorable I have often recommended it.

I am sure there have been others, but I am going to choose The Book Thief by Marcus Zusak as the book I didn’t think I would like but ended up loving. When it was chosen for my book club I was thrilled as it was on my tbr list, but when I started to read it I thought, oh dear, this just isn’t going to be my cup of tea at all. Since it was a book club pick, though,  I thought I would try to muscle my way through it; the discussion isn’t nearly as much fun if you haven’t read the book. About 50 pages in – wham! I fell madly in love with Zusak’s main character, Liesel, and the rest of the characters. Set in Nazi Germany, The Book Thief,  narrated by Death ( a conceit that actually never stops being effective) is Liesel’s story, but it is not hers alone. If you love books, if you love the notion that words have the power to set you free, if you abhor prejudice and hatred, if you have hope in your heart, The Book Thief might just be the best book you’ve never read. This book deserves the hype.

When I finished this book (after I wiped the tears away) I started making a list of all the people I wanted to read it: my children, my students, my friends…

I really, really love it.