Online Book Stuff Post the Second: In Which I Get Really Excited About Reading Lists

Thanks to Jamie at The Broke and the Bookish, today I discovered another book blog: A Striped Armchair, by Eva. I really like her writing style and I think our taste in books is quite similar, so this is another one I'll be trying to follow regularly.

On this blog, Eva has created a page entirely devoted to her yearly reading lists. They are insanely ambitious, for reasons she describes in her 'About' section. I doubt that I will ever be in a position to compete with that prolific list -- not that it's a competition or anything... But I really like the idea of using a blog page to post past and current reads.

I once estimated that I read around 30 books per semester as an undergraduate majoring in English literature and Anthropology, with other courses spanning Sociology, Political Science, Women's Studies, Linguistics, and more. A lot of those were textbooks or non-fiction books related to course work, but from second through fourth years, I took three English courses each semester and many of the texts I read were fiction. So I did manage to plow through a lot of novels and story collections during my university years -- and that doesn't include books I read for "fun" during summers or holidays.

Since then, my progress through reading lists has slowed down radically. In journalism school, I barely read anything that wasn't a newspaper, an online news source, or a textbook about Marshall McLuhan. (How much do I wish that Douglas Coupland's biography of McLuhan had been out in 2007? A lot.) As a post-grad, I was too busy looking for jobs and having pre-quarter-life crises to be able to wrap my head around serious lit-rah-chah. But when I am not reading, I miss it in a very tangible way. So despite having a full-time job and being an adult-type-person with real-life responsibilities, I am trying these days to spend more time reading and less time watching TV. I actually canceled my cable last month -- this is serious business.

Given everything I mentioned in my post yesterday about online book communities, I'm not sure posting a reading list on a blog page is any more interactive than the Excel list I keep on my laptop. (I wasn't kidding about the Excel list. My mother is a statistician -- lists are also serious business in our family.) But at least it allows me to share my picks with others, if not generating automatic recommendations from Indigo or publishers.

A friend of mine sent me a comment on Facebook after reading yesterday's post, saying she uses Wereads (formerly ireads) and had a good experience. If you use any of the book communities and have good or bad things to say, please let me know in the comments section.

The Question of Online Book Communities

A year or two ago, I signed up for an application called Visual Bookshelf on Facebook. I rarely use third-party applications on Facebook, since it's become clear that these applications collect personal data from user profiles. However, as someone with a reading list that spans as many pages as a Masters' thesis summary, and who treated her undergraduate degree in English literature as a four-year series of book club meetings, I was enthusiastic about an app that would let me brag to my friends about the many extremely tasteful books I was reading at any given time. After all, if there is any public space that embraces narcissism, it is Facebook.

The beauty of the Visual Bookshelf application was that it published a note in your friends' news feeds whenever you made a change in your "shelf": Meghan is now reading War and Peace. Meghan has just finished reading Great Expectations.  Meghan would like to read a Faulkner trilogy, but doesn't want to end up suicidally depressed. (Okay, I made that last one up -- the status notices did not allow for ironic editorializing.) News feeds would also display reviews that any of your friends made after reading books, recommendations, and encouraged sharing -- ie, Rachel owns a book that you just indicated you'd like to read.

Then everything changed: Facebook went through one of its maligned format changes, and suddenly the Visual Bookshelf application no longer functioned in the same way. Maybe it had been designed to work best with the older version of Facebook, and no longer shows up properly. I'm not sure. But either way, something got messed up: now, when I click on my Visual Bookshelf tab, it brings me to a page called LivingSocial. What is LivingSocial? Some other kind of book-related community, sure, but how did I end up with a profile here? The publishing features have changed, too: instead of publishing an item in my friends' news feeds about what I'm reading, people would have to actually click on the "Books" tab in my Facebook profile to see my latest "activities". Nobody cares that much about what I'm reading, not even my fellow book nerds. It's simply too much effort -- too hidden.

More recently, I discovered Chapters-Indigo's online Community. From what I could tell, it was essentially Facebook for booklovers: you can add books to various "shelves", like "plan to read", "already read", etc, but you could also add people as friends, join discussion groups, participate in chats. In principle, it was a great idea; in practice, not so much. I don't know of anyone else among my friends who have Community accounts with Indigo, and I wasn't interested enough in the discussion groups to seek out strangers as "friends". I did continue to use my account, mainly for the shelf application. Whenever I get personalized emails from Chapters-Indigo suggesting books I might like (to purchase), there's an option right in the email to add books to my shelf. I use it as a way to track books I come across that I want to check out at some point.

But to complicate matters, Indigo also has Wishlists and Shopping Cart lists inside user accounts on its website. Wishlists are clearly geared toward gift-giving, so that friends and family can find out what books you'd actually like to receive ("Oh, thanks Uncle Marvin, this biography of Winston Churchill looks just fascinating..."). Shopping Cart lists are books you've decided you actually want to purchase online. At some point during the Indigo online experience, I completely forget where I've listed what, and end up feeling like I have no overall list that is reflective of what I hope to read anytime soon.

Recently I've begun following several book bloggers on Twitter and Google Reader to get a better sense of what other people are reading. Not everyone's taste is the same as my own, but I'm convinced that I will stumble upon far more great books this way than if I were left to my own devices. And a few of these bloggers are members of Amazon book clubs, or a community called Goodreads. Goodreads seems to combine all of the aspects that I'd like to see in a book-related community, but frankly I'm a bit tired of going to the trouble of creating new profiles, loading up my latest lists, and then letting it fall to the wayside. I've got Social Book Networking Fatigue. By the time I discovered BookLounge.ca, a site dedicated to promoting books from Canadian publishers McClelland & Stewart, Random House, Doubleday and others, I was totally confused about which sites to participate in.

To me, it seems pointless to maintain a Facebook account, a Myspace page, a Twitter page, a personal blog, a Tumblr account, Google Reader feeds including the sharing-with-friends feature, and so on through the less mainstream sites like Digg and Delicious. I stick to the basics: Facebook for people I actually know in real life, Google Reader for real-world news and for following traditional blogs, and Twitter for witticisms and general lurking purposes to keep up with trends.

The same holds true for bookish sites: I can't possibly keep up with three or four different communities and accounts. I might get a better representation of all the great new books that are out there, but I'd never get any work done if I had to devote that much time to even reading the updates, let alone participating. So which one to pick?

Anything's better than an Excel spreadsheet list.

The James Clare Tribute Band

Greetings! For those of you who actually follow this blog in any kind of regular fashion, I apologize for my recent (total) lack of posting. Work and real life took over for awhile, precluding much of my internet activity. And then I got back into Twitter in a big way, especially during such exciting events as the Toronto mayoral race (don't get me started), so I've been paying a lot more attention to that form of expression lately. Sometimes Twitter is just a better medium when you have one specific thing to say, and feel that it's not expansive enough or intelligent enough for a full blog post.

The last few months have been intense for me. I've spent a lot of time pondering my decisions about where to live, how to spend my time outside of work, and what my priorities should be. As I said to a friend recently, in a lot of ways I am lucky that I have options to choose from and the freedom to make my own decisions about these things. But I tend to see the wide-open space as a scary abyss and a lack of direction, instead of as an opportunity.

I've also dealt with sadness recently, when we lost my grandfather. I was lucky enough to go through my entire childhood and adolescence with three grandparents, without ever losing a family member or close friend. Now I have lost two of those grandparents in the last year and a half. Both times, I had the surreal feeling that I was living out a role I'd only read about or seen in movies, and wasn't sure how I should actually be feeling. There were many moments when I showed grief on the outside and felt panicked on the inside, but most of the time I felt numb, or kept myself busy trying to be supportive and helpful to my relatives who had just lost a parent.

My papa had been dealing with dementia and alzheimer's-type symptoms for three or four years. It crept up on us; at 80, he was a remarkably healthy and ever-cheerful man who loved to participate in intelligent conversations and was active in community volunteering, hospital boards, et cetera. Within a few years, he was losing his short-term memory and had trouble finding the correct word while speaking or locating an object that was mentioned to him. At 84, he no longer recognized many of his family members and friends. Yet he remained an incredibly patient and kind person, never complaining about his situation though it must have been so frustrating, and still lighting up and giving us a welcoming smile when we came over.

For most of us, it took a long time to accept that he wasn't entirely himself anymore, and we tried as much as possible to treat him the same way we always did. But it hurt to see him that way, needing so much more care from my grandmother and not being able to participate in conversations or games the way he used to.

One Sunday in September, the whole family (about 20 of us) gathered to celebrate my grandmother's 80th birthday. We had planned a whole special evening: a limo to pick up my grandparents at their house, stops along the way to pick up various other aunts and uncles, a surprise stop for champagne and toasts at another house with all of the grandchildren (and great-grandson) waiting, then on to a dinner, complete with slide-shows. It was a wonderful night to celebrate my grandma and the family she created with her husband.

On the morning of the following Thursday, I got a message from my cousin saying that Papa had had a stroke and was in the hospital. Those of us who live out of town stopped what we were doing -- in my case, checking my morning emails; in my dad's case, driving to the office for an early meeting -- and did the only conceivable thing: get to the hospital. There was a Greyhound bus leaving from downtown in an hour and a half; I showered, packed a bag, and took a subway to the station in record time, my heart pounding and inner monologue yelling the entire time. After a bus ride that seemed to last forever, I arrived at the hospital to be with my family, many of whom were already there. Papa was not conscious at this point, and did not wake up fully while we were there. He was in the intensive care unit for about two days, all of us there with him, until he passed away.

Throughout the four days that followed, through the phone calls and writing the newspaper obituary and the wake and the funeral, the recurring sentiment among our family and from friends was that we were all incredibly lucky to have each other to lean on and to create a loving atmosphere for such a sad happening. I don't know that having all of us there made it any easier to say goodbye to our grandfather; I hope that it was in some way helpful to my grandmother to know that she wouldn't be alone. But the whole experience reminded me, once again, what family means and why it's so important to me. We've spent so many evenings together at parties, laughing and dancing and enjoying each other's company, not just because we're family but because we genuinely have a good time together. And when we're able to come together during the difficult times as well, it makes me feel even closer to those friends I happen to be related to. It also makes me miss my other cousins, aunts and uncles who live farther away, miss them more than I usually do, but still feel happiness that I share those bonds with them too and remember the times when we've been together through sadness.

One of the things I found difficult to grasp while going through my Papa's passing was the idea of heaven or afterlife. This side of my family is Catholic, many of them practising, and so it was comforting to all of us to be told by priests and friends that he would be with us after he passed, and would know that we were all expressing our love for him. But as someone who stepped away from regular churchgoing 10 years ago, I struggled to think about this in an intellectual way. And so it was even more emotionally meaningful to me when I heard about my dad's conversation with his uncle, the morning that Papa had passed.

My dad had called to tell my great-uncle that his brother, my grandfather, had passed away. His uncle said, "I knew he had passed when I saw a rainbow in the sky early this morning." After hearing this, my dad came into the kitchen to share the story, with tears in his eyes. He told us that on Thursday morning, while driving to make it to the hospital in time to see his father, he'd said a silent prayer, asking God to send us a rainbow if his dad passed away.

It's been a month and a half since my grandfather's passing, and this story still makes my heart pound and my fingers shake. My belief system is irrelevant in the context of what my dad experienced. To my family, the rainbow was just one of several signs that our grandfather is still with us and will remain a part of our daily lives.

Second protest of the week, certainly not the last

Taken from my office window: Native land rights protest passing City Hall at Queen and Bay streets in Toronto, two days before the G20 summit:

Do what scares you

When you're trying to take a step toward something you've dreamed about your whole life, the fear of failure is a very real thing. Even if you've had the creative impulse your whole life, it's so easy to avoid making a real effort to pursue your true passion because you're terrified you'll end up on the floor of the Reviews section, chewed up, vomited out, and utterly rejected by the industry you so love.

So sometimes, when you pick up a pen and take that first step, you need to do it while eating three-day-old pizza at ten o'clock on a Saturday morning.

If you're gonna feel nauseous, there might as well be a reason for it.

Today's dose of linguistic snobbery

It's Friday, and I have a pet peeve to bitch about. Twice in the last week I've read articles in high-quality publications that began by stating that "it is a cliché to say" such-and-such a thing. And then went on to say that very thing.

Exhibit A:
Sentence 1: "It's a cliché to talk about how easy it is to make a movie in this digital age."
Sentence 2: "The low cost of filming in digital, editing on a laptop, and wrangling some musician friends into whipping up a soundtrack ... ..."

By acknowledging the cliché, you have not purged yourself of the guilt associated with using that cliché.

Just because you have shown yourself to be aware of your own lack of originality, you have gained nothing in the eyes of your readers. There are no hipster points for self-aware use of clichés; overused phrases are not the written-word equivalent of the hideous grandpa-glasses and ill-fitting pants you kids seem to think you can get away with just because you admit they look stupid. (Exhibits B and C.) [ETA: these photos have since been removed, either for copyright infringement or for general hideousness.]

You are not reclaiming the phrase, giving it a new meaning for the twenty-first century. You cannot use a cliché ironically, because by its very repetition, the use of a cliché is itself clichéd.

In short: cliché is not the new black.

Here's a thought: whether you're writing for the New York Times or a glossy fashion magazine (both of which are guilty parties in this case), take the time to think up your own metaphors. And if something is clichéd, perhaps it's not worth writing about. There's nothing worse than reading a piece and being able to tell that the writer was stuck for a good lede and decided to trick the reader into thinking we were getting something brilliant.

We were not fooled. And we are not amused.

For further Exhibits and Appendices, please review http://www.latfh.com/.

I am not a pretty girl, that is not what I do

God help you if you are an ugly girl
Of course, too pretty is also your doom
'Cause everyone harbors a secret hatred
for the prettiest girl in the room
-- Ani DiFranco

I once tried out for cheerleading.

Despite my general disdain for all things stereotypical and gender-biased and demeaning and choreographed, I lined up with dozens of other girls in the bubble-domed gym on the second or third day of Frosh Week in my first year at university. I went as a favour to a high school friend who had ended up at the same university, who had been a cheerleader in high school, and who begged me to come to try-outs so she wouldn't be alone.

None of the other girls we knew at school had agreed to go, which probably should have warned me. But I had no idea what I was getting into at the time -- my only hesitation was the fact that if any of my male friends found out, I would never hear the end of it.

Most of the people I hung out with in high school tended to judge cheerleading by its American mid-west stereotypes: a bunch of pretty, stupid girls bouncing around the edges of a football field or in front of the gym bleachers, shaking their pom-poms both literally and figuratively, cheering on the boys with inane spelling games and fighting amongst themselves for attention and world domination. You know, like Mean Girls, but in the '50s.

Not that anyone would blame us for believing it -- Hollywood has done its part to perpetuate that stereotype. This is not a democracy. It's a cheerocracy.... whatever that means. Did you ever see Molly Ringwald play a cheerleader? No, because she's always supposed to be the outsider, the one who gets it, the one who's above all that high school popularity bullshit (while simultaneously pining for the most popular rich boy). She'd never be caught dead in a short pleated skirt, although she'd give her panties to a geek to save his rep as a dude. It's not just the '80s either -- look at Glee, one of the most inventive TV shows around right now. Their cheerleader, while smart and talented in areas other than backflips and wiggling, is just another Kirsten Dunst: blonde, vindictive, selfish and manipulative. And, um, knocked up.

Part of this is just your typical sexism, the refusal to believe that a bunch of girls or women can be around each other for longer than ten minutes without dissolving in cat-fights and back-stabbing. That women as a group are more likely to be supportive and nurturing than calculating each other's failures, that hanging out with your girlfriends makes you feel happy and positive instead of insecure and self-hating. Not to mention the fact that guys probably don't hate having a bunch of pretty, athletic girls dancing around on the sidelines while they perform their heroics.

So it's not hard to fathom why my friends and I didn't hang out with any cheerleaders. I should point out that by the time I was in high school, between 1998 and 2003, most cheerleading squads were far more focused on athletic competition and gymnastics than cheers and pom-poms. There were even a few guys cheerleading, but of course with the usual homophobia resulting. I don't know if it's different in the United States, what with the cult-like adoration entire towns seem to feel for high school football teams. Probably the more stereotypical cheerleaders abound in Canada too, along with the more enlightened ones. But none of this erases the fact that cheerleading -- like gymnastics, dancing, swimming, and every other activity highly dependent on a certain body type -- seems to drag girls into hyper-awareness of weight and body image, unhealthy eating practices, and girl-on-girl politics.

Fast-forward to my university campus in September 2003. Sitting on the edge of the indoor track inside the dome, we listened as a tight-muscled, tight-shorts-wearing, perfectly made-up young woman explained what we were signing up for. If we made the team, there would be daily practices and monitored work-outs at the campus gym. There would be competition meets at other schools, many of them requiring travel, at least every other week. The hours of commitment were more than any of us were prepared to allot to a part-time job throughout our entire university careers. Oh, and it cost hundreds of dollars as well, for uniforms and travel fees. Essentially, cheerleading WAS a job -- and a lifestyle. And on that note, it was time to stand up and perform.

I have tried out for many teams in many sports before, and played several of them for years. I've been to sports camps where I was forced to run around in 30-degree sun while bored counselors sat in the shade. I've been the camp counselor, the peer helper, the social coordinator, the orientation volunteer leading younger students in physical activity requiring endless adrenaline and memorized chants and face paint. And I've had personal trainers push me to my limits in weight rooms. Yet I can honestly say that the three-hour university cheerleading tryout was the most physically demanding thing I have ever done in my life.

We ran laps. We did push-ups. We did lifts and standing formations and routine falls. We did burpees, a form of torture I can only assume was invented sometime during the Spanish Inquisition. Halfway through, my face was so red I thought my skin would burst into flame, along with my burning muscles and lungs. I never caught my breath fully during the whole ordeal, and I wheezed for days afterward. My hands shook, my knees trembled, my heels and shins locked up and stayed there.

And that was day one of a multi-day try-out.

As my friend and I dragged ourselves and our backpacks up the hill toward our residence halls around 6 o'clock that night, I think we both re-evaluated the myth of the cheerleader. My friend resigned herself to the fact that university-level cheerleading is an entirely different beast than the simple high-school competition she was used to. As for me, I was beginning to understand why so many cheerleaders were supposedly such evil creatures, since you'd have to be a true masochist to put yourself through that experience on a daily basis.

Although that day was my first and last venture into the squad life, I later met other girls who were more successful at it. One of them even went on to cheer for a professional football team. And let me just say this: I may not have much respect for the cheerleader ideal, but I will never mess with one of those girls. I've seen what it takes to make them what they are, and it's not pretty.