Ex Libris: 100+ Books to Read and Reread

In Ex Libris: 100+ Books to Read and Reread, former New York Times chief book critic Michiko Kakutani shared her thoughts on some of her favourite titles. These short reviews, either two or three pages long, surprisingly encompassed few of the classics and focussed on contemporary fiction and a high proportion of new nonfiction. Thus in addition to The Great Gatsby and Moby-Dick, we read about Trevor Noah's Born a Crime, Tara Westover's Educated and Roz Chast's graphic memoir Can't we talk about something more PLEASANT? There is none of the caustic evisceration Kakutani is notorious for here, as she is not pillorying authors but rather celebrating them. Her praise was succinct and expressed as carefully as a Flaubert sentence. I credit her for turning me on to some authors I had never heard of, and added their names and titles to my notes. 

This collection was a treat for the eyes and fingers, as the illustrations by Dana Tanamachi evoked both centuries-old gilt woodcut bookplates as well as summer of love Haight-Ashbury concert posters. I read a pristine new copy and the page edges were uniform and flush and a pleasure to feel when the book was closed. I am a merciless critic of those who are ignorant of the rules of forming the English possessive. I was thrilled to no end to see Kakutani getting it right every time when she wrote Eggers's, Camus's, Borges's, Richards's and so on. Of course she would know this. Would she please have a word with the writers of "Jeopardy!", who belie their intelligence by dropping the S when making nouns ending in X possessive. Thus Max' and Lorax'. It looks hideous. Yet Kakutani did err in the misspelling millenium on page 80, while she did get it right as millennial(s) on pages 91, 144, 247 and 291. 

To supplement the 1001 Books You Must Read series, read some of Kakutani's recommendations too. 

Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's on-line catalogue 

The Flyer Vault: 150 Years of Toronto Concert History

 

The Flyer Vault: 150 Years of Toronto Concert History by Daniel Tate & Rob Bowman was light on content but heavy in its mass. Its pages were substantially glossy and thick, rendering its 306 pages as weighty as most books twice its size. 

The title refers to Tate’s vast library of concert flyers which he and music journalist Rob Bowman researched and wrote about. They reproduced these posters in vibrant colour, and found yellowed newspaper ads for some very early Toronto shows. I always had to use a magnifying class to read the fine print on the posters, which are essentially illegible when shrunk to fit the dimensions of even a large paperback. 

Chapters were divided by musical genre and era. The authors deliberately ignored classical music, yet profiled inasmuch as it could genres by chronological history, starting thus with minstrel shows and vaudeville, followed by jubilees, spirituals and gospel tours, then jazz, blues, country and folk, followed by all forms of popular music from post-WWII. 

A book of such length should have taken me merely a couple days to read, but unfortunately I found I could only take in two chapters at a time. The format of showing a poster and then listing the contents and a concert review, if there was one available, made for a sleepy read after an hour. 

Tate and Bowman were competent researchers who often proved the newspapers wrong when concerts were cancelled or rescheduled last-minute, leaving the public record–newspaper ads and public posters–still showing the incorrect dates. Their research proved that even the memories of the performers themselves were wrong at times. I still found some inconsistencies, though, for example in regards to the date of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s first concert in Toronto. Was it in July 1983 at the CNE Bandshell (as stated on page 52) or in June 1983 at the Concert Hall (page 53)? The text was otherwise flawless with the exception of the possessive apostrophe error of it’s for its on page 278: “…it certainly had it’s coming out party in Toronto.” I also wondered why they always referred to Patti Smith as a poetess and not simply a poet.

Bowman exposed the sometimes racist reviews left by Toronto newspaper columnists. Open-mindedness was not a trait of some reviewers, who preferred to see and hear exactly what they expected on concert stages. Innovative artists who decided to shake up their performances were often given the thumbs down. Thus I was pleasantly surprised to read Bowman’s favourable review of Yoko Ono’s performance at the Toronto Rock and Roll Revival:

“Yoko Ono contributed an astonishing version of ‘Don’t Worry Kyoko (Mummy’s Only Looking for Her Hand in the Snow),’ which the conservative Toronto media of the time predictably trashed. History would prove their take on Yoko to be both racist and artistically wrong-headed given the influence Yoko would have on numerous new wave and alternative rock bands to come.”

The Flyer Vault is a rich trip down memory lane where clubs and venues of the past come back to life and on more than one occasion I stopped myself and recalled “Oh yeah, I was there!”

Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's on-line catalogue

The Pelee Project: One Woman's Escape from Urban Madness

 

The Pelee Project: One Woman's Escape from Urban Madness is Jane Christmas's account of her three months spent on Pelee Island during the winter of 2000. Stressed out at work and by her daily commute to Toronto from Hamilton, Christmas was feeling the urgent need to get away from the rat race. After previous visits to Pelee Island, Christmas felt the call of the Lake Erie island as the perfect place to relax. Accompanied by her eight-year-old daughter Zoë, Christmas left her two sons and boyfriend behind and braved the winter on a virtually abandoned Pelee Island.

I discovered this book when I visited the island this past summer. I spoke to plenty of locals who claimed that only a hearty seventy souls stuck it out all winter; if that number is true then it is about half the winter population from twenty years ago when Christmas was there. Even so, it's still a tiny fraction of the summer population. I lapped up her story because I could identify with it so intimately since I had also decided--twenty years ago, as well--to take a leave of absence from work. I wanted to study the Finnish language in Helsinki. It was a break I needed and it made me a stronger and more confident person. It was one of the best decisions I had ever made. However Christmas found that those around her were not always supportive of her plans to take some time off:

"What really ticked them off, it seemed, was not that I had dared to dream but that I had dared to turn dream into reality." 

I recall the quizzical stares I received when I told some people that I wanted to study the Finnish language during the summer of 2000. "Are you Finnish?" and "What could you possibly use that language for?" were typical reactions. Some people were quite thrilled to hear about my desire to do it and maybe I inspired some dreaming in others. Christmas used the end of her book to stress the importance of taking time off such as in leaves of absence and the need for more companies to grant such leaves to their employees. 

Christmas arranged to transport her car to the island before the ferry discontinued its service over the winter. She rented a house from a travelling islander and enrolled Zoë in the school, but she couldn't plan everything in advance. There was one important thing that slipped her mind: it was a culture shock to find herself without adequate groceries and a store that wouldn't be open for a couple more days. You will laugh with her as she regales you with her first attempt to use the island's gas pump. Yet she adapted and quickly made friends who were generous to share and help out.

Her descriptions were stunning. The stillness of a wintry island in the middle of Lake Erie--the white landscape surrounded by white ice topped with a white sky--made for an image that literally gave me chills as I read it. She experienced sunsets that were unlike any she had ever seen before. I witnessed such a pink explosion of sun over the summer. With life at a slower pace, she could pay attention to the birds and identify each species--and plenty of birds stop at the island during their migrations. Conversations mattered and people were more honest with her. It was easy for her to feel at home among her islander friends when she developed the skills to listen:

"I had long lost the capacity to listen--really listen--to my children or to anyone; I had perfected a habit of intently looking at people with compassion-filled eyes while simultaneously making a mental list of things I had to pick up at the store."  

Christmas could see the positive, calmer changes that had come over her. She had developed a closer relationship with Zoë and even her own mother, who had stopped by the island on a visit, remarked at her transformation. It was as though Christmas had been baptized in Lake Erie. While she was on Pelee, she remarked: 

"I wished I could live my life over and make decisions based on the quality of my life rather than on the elusiveness of some imaginary career quest mapped out by media messages, social expectations, and a myopic women's movement that ignored the richness of a rural life."

My brief time on Pelee Island ignited a spark to see more of the island during the summer and now that I have read about the winter there I think I would enjoy a wind-battered snowy stay too. 

Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's on-line catalogue

The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

And so I come across The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time by John Kelly. The timing couldn't have been better. Kelly wrote an immediately accessible history of the plague from its Asian origins to appearance in Europe in 1347. For such a science-heavy history, with 37 pages of endnotes, I did not feel overwhelmed by tech talk nor was the writing polluted with sensationalism, for there is nothing like a horror story about millions of people moaning in pain to keep one reading. Thankfully the author did not resort to the ghoulish side of mass death to keep me interested when the science alone motivated me to turn pages. 

The plague, carried by fleas found on rats in ships, got its foothold in Europe via Crimea. It then invaded the continent over the next three years, killing over one third of the population. We travelled with these rats and fleas as the disease made its way across Europe. There is evidence for two kinds of plagues that afflicted the European continent at this time: both a pneumonic and a bubonic variety. The former, with its ceaseless bloody cough, had the power to kill a person within three days while the latter exhibited the grotesque symptom of protruding buboes. People died en masse and villages were wiped out. Theories of contagion were still unknown and transmission was believed to occur via poisoned water, tainted air or by some astrological alignment. Since entire families were known to perish within mere days (only possible with the pneumonic variety) family members were afraid of one another for fear of catching the mysterious disease next:

"Of the plague's divisive effects, Boccaccio writes, 'It was not merely a question of one citizen avoiding another;...this scourge had implanted such a great terror in the hearts of men and women that brothers abandon brothers, uncles their nephews, sisters their brothers, and in many cases, wives deserted husbands. But even worse, and almost incredible was the fact that fathers and mothers refused to nurse and assist their own children, as though they did not belong to them.'"

One reason which led me to award this book five stars was Kelly's evocative descriptions. Imagine being part of a family and suddenly hearing your brother start coughing:

"Residents were quick to recognize the uncontrollable cough of pneumonic plague, the violent, spasmodic tattoo that threw people against walls or doubled them over in the streets, left chins and shirtfronts stained with bloody mucus, and produced a rattling noise in the lungs that sounded like a heavy iron chain being dragged across cobblestone."

No wonder family members abandoned one another. Once they heard that first cough, they knew it meant immediate death. 

I recalled the news reports about the mass coronavirus graves on New York's Hart Island when I read what Boccaccio wrote next:

"Such was the multitude of corpses [that] huge trenches were excavated in the churchyards, into which new arrivals were placed in their hundreds, stored tier upon tier like ships' cargo, each layer of corpses being covered with a thin layer of soil till the trench was filled to the top."

Kelly quoted other historians who, at the time, described the corpses being laid to rest in orderly rows like a plate of lasagna. The author thus provided some Italian culinary history, dating that specific pasta dish to at least the fourteenth century. 

The Black Death occurred during the brief period of the Avignon papacy and Kelly could not ignore the effect religion had on the interpretation of the plague. The laity was abandoned after so many clergymen died. Prayers went unheeded and thus the church proved to be just as ineffective as doctors and astrologers in trying to stop the carnage. It is no wonder that an increasing disillusionment with the church developed after the plague. The changing nature of the papacy to a "pay"-pacy didn't help, and I couldn't suppress a chuckle when I read this favourite passage from the book, below: 

"The most damaging aspect of the Avignon papacy, however, was its utter lack of moral seriousness. Clement V and his successors transformed the Church into a spiritual Pez dispenser. The fertile minds at the curia had managed to create an indulgence for every imaginable situation and every imaginable sin. For a price, an illegitimate child could be made legitimate, as could the right to trade with the infidel, or marry a first cousin, or buy stolen goods."

The Great Mortality was the term used during the time which we now refer to as the Black Death. It is also the title of a book which was riveting as well as frightening, especially if precautions are not taken to slow the spread of the current disease ravaging the world. Seven hundred years ago no one knew about transmission or quarantine. We have that knowledge now, and must not plunge into blackness forsaking centuries of science. 

Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's on-line catalogue

The Knifenerd Guide to Japanese Knives : The Insider’s View of the Blacksmiths, Creation, Care, and Artistry of the Best Kitchen Knives in the World

This book came to my attention when it came up as missing during a shelf check for holds. I found the book misshelved but close to where it belonged. What I was first taken with was the very attractive and well made binding of the book. Library staff have to deal with a lot of binding damage so good binding is very appealing. When I was processing the book for a hold I noticed it was about Japanese knife making. I was intrigued and placed a hold on the book for myself for when the book came back. 

I had been in Japan two years earlier and had seen just how amazing Japanese cooking knives are first hand in the Kappabashi neighbourhood while I was in Tokyo. Kappabashi is famous for its dozens of kitchen and restaurant supply stores. Kappabashi’s patron mascot is the kappa, which is an anthropomorphic turtle-like creature from Japanese folklore. I still do not know what the connection is between cooking stores and kappas, but nearly every store and signpost had statues and cute cartoons of the creature. I must forewarn anyone who plans on looking up the Wikipedia article, kappa mythology is grossly bizarre or riotously funny depending on your sense of humour.

Cooking and the history and technology of cooking are subjects of interest and hobby for me so seeing Kappabashi had been on my bucket list for things to see in Tokyo. I was hoping to see beautiful traditional Japanese ceramics and lacquerware in Kappabashi and I was not disappointed. One of my favourite souvenirs from that trip was a bunny shaped stoneware salt cellar that I bought in Kappabashi. 

What I was unprepared for was all the knives! There were so many stores there that sold nothing but kitchen knives, and every single knife I saw a work of art. I had never seen so much variety and quality in finish and grind and there were so many different shapes and sizes of knives that did not exist in Western cooking. When I tried to talk to knife store workers my ignorance of Japanese knife conventions quickly became apparent. What was the functional difference between a knife made from super blue steel versus VG10 stainless steel? Alongside Western style knife types like carving knives and chef knives there were Japanese specific knife forms such as usaba and gyuto knives that I had no idea what they were used for. I noticed that many of the Japanese style knives were asymmetrical and only sharpened on one side or bevel of the blade. When I asked a store worker if the single sided blades could only be used by right handers or if there were left handed knifes that were ground on the reverse side, he looked at me like his head was going to explode. I left the kitchen market very, very curious to learn more about Japanese knives.

When The Knifenerd Guide arrived for me I was expecting a technical reference book with some historical information about Japanese knife making. The book definitely had that information, but it was more of a cross between a photo travelogue and an ethnographic account by a Canadian ex-chef and knife seller on how he first discovered Japanese knives and how he went to Japan to meet the artisans. 

The first half of the book records the stories of the various Japanese blacksmiths, apprentices, machinists, and sharpeners who work at the smithies and factories that still produce hand forged kitchen knives. There are many full page pictures of heavy industrial looking forges strewn with half finished masterpiece knives. Every surface is covered in black carbon dust. Some of the people interviewed were from families that had been smithing for more than ten generations. With the ban on the samurai from carrying swords during the Mejji Restoration and then the demilitarization of Japan after WWII, blacksmiths specializing in sword making lost most of their business. Many of the sword makers switched over to forging kitchen knives and incorporated many of the materials and techniques used to make swords.

There was juxtaposition in the book between the stories of the older generation of traditional blue collar craftsmen and the younger demographic that was more non-conformist. The oldest men interviewed, and they were all men, started apprenticing after WWII. When asked about their choice of career most of the old men said there was no choice, they were born into blacksmith families and expected to take on the family business after their fathers. The younger workers had more diverse reasons for pursuing knife making careers. Some of them were simply keeping on the family tradition, but many of them had grown up expecting to work white-collar jobs in big companies and knife making turned into their second career. Many said how they liked the creative freedom and the opportunities for experimentation in high end metal work compared to normal jobs. I suspect the longtime stagflation of the Japanese economy is a major factor in the flight of workers from “good” jobs to “dirty” jobs. There was only one young female knife worker in the Japanese knife industry that the author knew of but one of the blacksmiths spoke about wanting to apprentice his daughters when they got older.

The second half of the book goes into the technical details of how traditional Japanese knives are made. Forging steps, the chemistry behind the metallurgy, and the different finishes and ways of grinding are explained. For example the stainless steel Damascus steel used on some of the flashier knives does not usually form the cutting edge, but it is useful as a corrosion resistant cladding and for strengthening the more brittle carbon steel that typically form the razor sharp cutting edge and core of Japanese cooking knives. Different Japanese knife types are explained and how they are used and handled compare to standard Western knife types. There is how-to information on knife sharpening and sharpening stones. The second half of the book is geared towards professional food industry workers and collectors but it is useful information for home cooks who want to understand more about how their own knives work. I inherited some carbon steel and molybdenum steel knives and found the care and sharpening information very useful. 

Find this book in the Mississauga Library's Catalogue

 

This Team is Ruining My Life (But I Love Them): How I Became a Professional Hockey Fan

I picked up This Team is Ruining My Life (But I Love Them): How I Became a Professional Hockey Fan by Steve "Dangle" Glynn because it was a new book and the title as well as the cover photo looked interesting. I could certainly identify with the author, a devoted Toronto Maple Leafs fan whose hope for another Stanley Cup victory remains undying. The lengthy title sums up the contents, which start with Glynn's ventures into making his own YouTube videos following every Leafs game. From an audience of dozens, Glynn used his YouTube credentials and Leaf-loving perseverance to find a variety of jobs at sports networks and websites, He was able to go from nothing to "working at the toy store". 

The book reads like a plumped-up resume, listing every job--no matter how short--in Glynn's professional life. This format may not appeal to some readers, yet I could not put this book down. Glynn told his life story with the candour usually seen in diary entries. Insecurities are revealed and dealt with, and many chapters end with a life lesson learned, such as:

"No matter what your specialty is, it's worthwhile to know the intricacies of the other roles around you. It'll make you better at what you do and a better coworker."

"So when you speak your mind, speak the truth. Think before you speak, have purpose and evidence to support what you say, and be confident in your words, even if somebody gets in your face."

"You're in charge of what you can do. If you have a strength, you need to know how to best use that strength. If you have a weakness, identify it, acknowledge it, and figure out what you can do to make it better."

Glynn is upfront about his battles with anxiety and the value of therapy. This Team is Ruining My Life does serve at times as a personal diary in which he chronicles his bouts with unexpected tears and crying fits. I wondered if he would explain these bouts, as they happened frequently, but he did address them in the second half of the book. 

There were a number of poignant moments that struck me as I read. The most memorable was that I was reading it on the tenth anniversary of Sidney Crosby's gold medal-winning goal at the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver. Glynn wrote about watching the overtime game between Canada and the US on February 28, 2010 and here I was reading all about that glorious event exactly ten years later. Two other moments were profound. After we just lost Kobe Bryant in a helicopter crash, Glynn shared a story about sports personality Cabbie Richards, which began with:

"In 2009, Cabbie famously got to ride around with Kobe Bryant in his helicopter." 

And he had a certain remark about Don Cherry:

"The essay I wrote was called 'Sour Grapes,' and it was about how Don Cherry could get away with saying literally anything on-air."

Up to November 9, 2019 he could. 

As a YouTuber Glynn forged his own personality and style, and Leafs fans could identify with him as he expressed his honest opinions about the state of the team. He let it all hang out in his book, with exasperated rants that read as well as they probably seemed when expressed live. I particularly liked this one defeated sad rant:

"The Leafs crashed back to reality and totally sucked, yet again, missing the 2011 playoffs."  

Some sports broadcasters are known to be opinionated on a wide variety of topics (remember Don Cherry) and Glynn got it right about his interactions with some Americans:

"Americans have a lot of nerve goofing on Canadian accents. Whatever they speak in Pittsburgh, it's not English."

How true. I finished this book while on holiday in Florida and an American resident of the sunshine state, upon hearing me speak, treated me like a freak show. It was insulting and annoying for me to defend my Canadian accent with a smile as I struggled through her own Bronx accent, which I never even referred to in my defensive retaliation. I guess Canadians are too nice.   

Three errors struck my attention. Steve, if you reprint this book, please fix the following gaffes (italics are mine):

"I took that as a queue to sit my ass down..." (p. 181). Should be cue.

"The most encouraging feedback came from Justin Bourne, a former professional and college hockey player, who had wrote about the punk test for TheScore.com." (p. 235). Should be who had written or just who wrote. 

"Each team got to pick one NHL alumni to play on their team with them." (p. 311). Alumni is plural. Should be one NHL alumnus. 

I must confess that even though I had never heard of Steve Glynn before I picked up his book, I had no desire while reading it to check out his videos on-line. And now that I have finished reading this book and written its review, I have still not bothered to look for him on YouTube. So I suppose I can call myself a fan of Dangle without ever seeing any of the work he is famous for. I also don't spend my spare time surfing through YouTube so if I'm going to encounter Steve Glynn on camera it will likely be in the context of a hockey broadcast I am already watching. So Dangle--you've got a fan who's never even seen (or heard) you in action. Keep up the good work. 

Find this book in the Mississauga Library System's on-line catalogue

Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love by Dani Shapiro

Fifty-four years old, happily married, a teenage son, a successful career--what might it take to create an existential crisis?

For Dani Shapiro, it was finding out that her beloved but deceased father, the parent to whom she'd felt closest, was not her biological father. She was conceived by artificial insemination in a laboratory in Philadelphia after her parents had struggled for years to have a child. A donor's sperm was mixed with her father's, as was the accepted "treatment" at the time. The result was that the donor was her actual father.

She becomes consumed with trying to find out if her parents knew that the "treatment" had given her a different father. Did they lie to her? By this time, both her parents had died. She could remember fragments of conversations with them about her different physical features, about the circumstances of her birth, but they had never hinted in any way that she was not her father's daughter. She questions her father's relatives and his friends to try to learn the truth but they really cannot help her.

But they do. Her family friends and relatives are supportive and loving, and they reiterate the nobility of her father. They do tell her all she needs to know.

Or do they? What does she really want?

For all her researching tenacity, there are huge questions that she avoids, perhaps because she has no personal interest in the answers. We find out nothing about her mother's lineage or extended family, which is apparently still Shapiro's own. That being said, we never learn if Shapiro even attempted to confirm the DNA findings with her mother's living relatives.

Why did she not try different DNA tests? Why is she only interested in her paternal line?

This is a well-written memoir, honest and revealing, but it leaves the reader with much to consider. Being a memoirist, that can be a good thing for Dani Shapiro.

This book is part of the Mississauga Library System's 2020 Raves and Faves collection.
 

Find this book in our library's catalogue