I’ve read Howard Norman’s fiction before, with mixed results (one I loved but another was disappointing), and have had My Famous Evening (subtitled Nova Scotia Sojourns, Diaries and Preoccupations), a collection of literary travel essays, on my ‘to read’ list since 2006. (As an aside, now that I have begun writing this post, I noticed that for the past three years, I’ve read something by Mr. Norman once at the beginning of each of the last three years.) Although I’m a Newfoundlander, I lived in Nova Scotia from the time I was 11 until my early 20s. It is one of the places I think of when I think of ‘home’  and I have many friends and memories there. My brother, Peter, lives there still.

The book is part of National Geographics’ Directions series, a collection of literary travel narratives. Although Norman is American and lives in the United States, he has traveled extensively through Nova Scotia and much of his fiction is set in the Atlantic Canadian region. In My Famous Evening, he collects decades worth of notes, observances and letters into four essays comprising literature, folklore, birding, and other aspects of Maritime life as well as his own emotional investment in Canada’s Ocean Playground.

Although I enjoyed the entire book, my favorite sections were the one telling the story of Marlais Quire, a young wife and mother in 1920s rural Nova Scotia, who was so in awe of the writings of Joseph Conrad, that she defied her husband and left her children to travel to New York in an attempt to see the esteemed writer speak at an event. We read about Marlais’ state-of-mind and emotions through letters she wrote to her sister, who shared them with Norman 50 years later. The other part I especially enjoyed was when he writes about the various omens and portentous events of the area, known in Nova Scotia as forerunners, which I first read about years ago in Helen Creighton’s fascinating and oh-so-scary (at least to my childhood imagination) book about the Nova Scotia paranormal, Bluenose Ghosts. Rather than frightening, Norman’s is enlightening, exploring how indelibly a landscape can imprint itself on the collective soul of a people.

Unassuming, melancholy and an ode to a beloved land, My Famous Evening is not a typical travelogue, but it is a superb one. It made me appreciate and love Nova Scotia all the more.

Applicable Reading Challenges: Support Your Local Library, 100+ Reading Challenge, Bibliophilic Books Challenge, Canadian Book Challenge 3, Essay Reading Challenge

Book Rating: 4: Good, solid book that I would recommend to others.

FTC Disclosure: I borrowed this book from the library.

I don’t remember how it was that I came to first read a book by David Sedaris (besides some vague recollection of randomly stumbling upon his books in bookstore) but I do remember when I first read a book of his. It was in a  hotel in downtown Halifax, Nova Scotia in the summer of 2001. My husband and I had gone back to the east coast to visit family and so I could collect the things I’d put in storage in Halifax. I was luxuriating in the aptly-named heavenly bed and annoying Mike with my staccato bouts of laughter as I read Me Talk Pretty One Day. From then on, I was a fan.

Every so often I would check his appearances site to see if he was going to be in my area, whether I was living in Atlanta, Providence or Charlotte. But I was always too late (he’d been there last week) or I’d be out of town or otherwise unable to go. I consoled myself with audiobook versions and found that I enjoyed listening to Sedaris read his stories even more than I liked reading them myself. I even turned my husband into a fan. But after 8 years of  never seeing him live, I was beginning to think I was destined never to do so. Then, just a few weeks ago, I happened to visit his site again and saw he was coming to Atlanta on April 15th. “Buy Tickets Now!” the site said, and I gleefully clicked over to the Ticketmaster site, entering in my event info, only to have “no results found” come back repeatedly. Then I called Ticketmaster, who informed me that the show was sold out. Argh, not again!

But then my husband, my sweet, resourceful husband, began scouting Craigslist for some ticket-holders who were forced for whatever reason to sell their tickets. Lucky for us, we benefited from someone else’s misfortune (aka out-of-town business meeting) and scored a couple of lower mezzanine tickets for the event. Yes!

Which all leads me up to tonight, the night of the performance. I’d debated about bringing along my books, since I own them all, but foolishly thought that with an audience of approximately 2,700 people, there’s no way he’d be doing book signings. So we get there, and what do I see? A table set up for book signings, of course! No David Sedaris though, as apparently he was stuck in the ubiquitous Atlanta traffic. A Cappella Books was there, however, selling copies of his books. I figured I wasn’t going to pass up the chance to actually talk with Sedaris, so I bought a hardbound copy of Me Talk Pretty One Day, which I justified since it is my sentimental favorite and I only had  the paperback version at home. We were told that he would be signing books after the show and so we went to our seats, wondering if we’d recognize any of the essays he’d share and waiting anxiously for the lights to dim. Finally, after a brief and mostly redundant introduction, David Sedaris came on stage. He was shorter than I thought he’d be. But that could just have been a trick of the stage and our location, as we were seated just close enough so we could just barely but not quite make out his facial expressions.

He regaled us with an hour or so of stories, beginning with the pre- and post-Obama election discussions he encountered around his home in Normandy and elsewhere abroad (no one believed we’d do it), and including other ruminations such as his trip to Australia and his encounter with the strange but wonderful kookaburra (which, now that I see photos of them, don’t look nearly as intimidating as they sounded), random and hilarious diary entries, observations on people who exaggerate the pronunication of certain foreign words (his favorite was an otherwise monotonous professor who said words like “Nicaragua” like some bad Antonio Banderas impersonator), and how his father liked to walk around the house in his underwear.

All too quickly, he was done. But before he opened it up to a short Q&A, he said that he would do something he typically does during a performance, and that’s recommend a book. Actually, in this case, an audiobook: Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads. He then went on to play a portion of one of the monologues, A Lady of Letters with Patricia Routledge (Hyacinth Bucket from Keeping Up Appearances for my fellow Britcom fans). The audience Q&A included questions about his quitting smoking (apparently it doesn’t really bother him), whether he Twitters (no, he doesn’t) and if he still uses a typewriter to type his manuscripts (no, he finally switched to the laptop Hugh bought him several years ago).

As soon as he walked off stage, Mike and I were making our way down to the lobby to the book signing area where I was about the 20th person in line. The whole time I’m in line I’m thinking of what I’m going to say. I know he doesn’t just sign the book and wave you on; David Sedaris is nicer than that. He’ll actually engage you in a conversation and spend a few minutes talking to you. Meeting David Sedaris is like meeting a rock star, or the literary equivalent of one; I was so nervous that I’d get up there and sound like an idiot. I decided I’d thank him for the book suggestion since during my time in line I’d remembered that Alan Bennett was the author of The Uncommon Reader, a book I thoroughly enjoyed, and see where it went from there.

The two women in front of me were talking to each other and texting on their iPhones, or more accurately, Twittering on their iPhones. For the 45 minutes or so  I stood in line behind them I got to hear for about 30 minutes what one of them had been entering on Twitter during the show, what she was entering as we stood in line, and what she was planning to enter later on. Now, no offence to all you Twitter fans, but I don’t really get the appeal. Granted, this is coming from the woman who took several years to latch onto the idea of keeping a blog and only got onto Facebook last year. But I digress. When they got up to talk with David, the Twitter-happy one of course gushed about her Twittering and even typed away on her keypad as she talked to him. Now I know I can be a bit of a fuddy-duddy, but to me, that’s about as rude as talking on a cell phone while interacting with someone else in person.

Anyway, finally it’s my turn and I get up there and tell him that I don’t Twitter either, that I can just manage to keep up with blogging. He asks me what I blog about and when I tell him books, he asks me what I’m reading. Now, you’d think I’d be prepared for this question. I get asked it often enough. But no, in front of David Sedaris, my mind goes blank and I desperately try to recall what I’ve been reading lately. I could have mentioned any of the books I’m currently in the midst of: the quirky short story collection St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, Craig Thompson’s graphic travelogue Carnet de Voyage, the sci-fi novel The Sparrow, or even the fact that I’ve been slogging through Great Expectations for over a month. But no, none of those come to mind. What does? Fannie freakin’ Flagg’s Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven, which I’m trying to read by tomorrow night’s library book club. Now there’s probably nothing wrong with Can’t Wait to Get to Heaven (I’m only two chapters in) and I’m sure Fannie Flagg is a wonderful woman and writer, but I would have preferred to come off as a bit less fluffy than that. For all I know he heard the name of the book and wondered what some conservative fundamentalist was doing at one of his shows. So while he doesn’t pursue that any further, he does ask me if I’d read The Lazarus Project, which no, I haven’t, but it is on my list and I did order it for the library. He raves about it for a few moments, saying that he was a little leery of reading it, thinking that it would be over his head but that he absolutely loved it. So that book has immediately shifted from my ‘want to read’ list to ‘must read’ pile. I got my wits back about me and made the comment about Alan Bennett, and then we talked for a couple minutes about audiobooks and he made another recommendation (writing it down for me so I’d remember – yeah, I’m keeping the note) for Tom Courtney’s Pretending to Be Me, which is a piece on poet Philip Larkin. My only recollection of Larkin is that he came across to me back in my early twenties as a stodgy crankpot, but that could just have been youthful arrogance. Another recommendation to add to my list.

That was it for our conversation, which lasted all of about 3 minutes. It was an absolutely fabulous evening and I hope I don’t have to wait another 8 years to hear him perform again.

Oh, as for the title of this post? Well, I was aware that Sedaris tends to write something quirky or nonsensical in his inscription, based perhaps on some obvious characteristic or something the person says. As I make my way back to our car, I open the book to the title page and read: “To Lesley – Diabetes is for Lovers.” OK, so he didn’t call me fat, but my neurotic side kicks into overdrive and in mere nanoseconds I’ve made the connection: diabetes = fat people = me = comment. But hey, if David Sedaris calling you fat won’t make you lose weight, what will?

So I was going along at a good clip last month, having read eight books by the time the middle of the month rolled around. And then I hit a wall. And that wall was Inkspell. I’ve had a copy checked out since mid-December and it’s been sitting on my nightstand, waiting for my mind to be in the right mood. That mood never really came but I figured since I was getting to the end of my borrowing time I needed to give it a go. Well, it was not to be. I picked it up and put it down several times over the course of about 10 days, and am still only about 80 pages in. I also couldn’t seem to find the time to write any reviews, so this is one of those catch-up posts so I can start with a clean slate for February. Here are the remaining books I read last month:

First up was Nick Hornby’s Housekeeping vs. The Dirt, the second collection of essays from his monthly Believer articles. I thought the title referred to the dilemma faced by readers – as in, “Should I dust or finish reading this chapter?” so I had a good laugh at myself when I finally realized what the title actually meant. I really enjoyed his first collection, The Polysyllabic Spree, and this followup was just as good. I didn’t add as many books to my wishlist, partially since I am trying to be more judicious about what I put on there, but mainly because I already knew about most of the books he mentions. I did, however, go out and buy the latest issue of Believer, even though I am a terrible magazine reader and have yet to crack the cover.

Which brings me to what I particularly enjoyed reading about, which was his commentary on the nature of being a reader and lover of books. For example, how you start certain books off on the nightstand with the best of intentions and slowly but surely they make their way to the permanent bookshelf where the chances of them being picked up again are slim, unless you chance upon some serendipitous discovery later on down the road. Or how some books just immediately get put to the permanent bookshelf as soon as you bring them home. I know I’ve done experienced both of those scenarios plenty of times and it was things like that, told in a humorous and self-deprecating manner, that really endeared me to Hornby and his writing. I’m looking forward to reading the third installment, Shakespeare Wrote For Money, which I got as a Christmas present.

Next was a novel by Howard Norman called The Museum Guard. This was again an author whose previous book I’d read was a favorite of mine last year, and so I was eagerly anticipating my second foray into his writing. The book tells the story of Defoe Russet, a young man in Halifax, Nova Scotia in the 1930s, who follows in his uncle’s footsteps by becoming a museum guard at the Glace Museum. Defoe becomes involved with a woman, Imogen, the local Jewish cemetery caretaker, who becomes infatuated and later obsessed with a painting of a Dutch woman on display at the Glace Musuem. While I enjoyed reading about a city I lived in for several year, and picturing familiar places like the historic Lord Nelson Hotel, where Defoe and his uncle live, and I really wanted to like this book, but I just couldn’t. The characters were not just unlikeable, they didn’t seem authentic to me, and acted in ways that seemed unrealistic or contrived for the sake of the novel. So, a disappointment for me, but I have another of his novels on my bookshelf, Northern Lights, and I’m going to give him another try at some point in the future, and hope my reaction to this book was just an anomaly.

Last was another novel with a Canadian setting, a book called Latitudes of Melt by Joan Clark, which takes place primarily in Newfoundland. One April night in 1912, a baby girl is found floating on an ice floe by a fisherman off the coast of Newfoundland. It is assumed she is a survivor of the Titantic disaster, but no one turns up to claim her and so the fisherman and his wife raise her as part of their family. The book tells the story of four generations of Aurora’s family – hers, her parents, her children and her grandchild, set against the backdrop of the Eastern outports along Newfoundland’s Avalon peninsula. I grew up partly in one such outport, where my grandfather still lives, and Clark’s fondness for these remote fishing villages is obvious, yet never patronizing or sentimental. The history and transformation of that part of Newfoundland is woven into the family’s history, so that we have a sense of the impact each have on the other. Aurora’s story, and the stories of her family, is as genuine as it is magical, and one that I will enjoy reading again.

All three of these books contributed to reading challenge goals: Housekeeping vs. The Dirt counts as both an Essay Reading Challenge selection and the ‘free’ slot in the 9 for 2009 TBR Challenge (the book was a birthday present from one of my nieces).  The Museum Guard counts as one of the Canadian Book Challenge selections, the ‘used’ slot in the 9 for 2009 TBR Challenge (I bought the book at a library donations book sale), and the ‘profession’ slot in the What’s in a Name? Challenge. And finally, Latitudes of Melt counts as another Canadian Book Challenge selection.

Anne Fadiman’s At Large and At Small is a collection of familiar essays that I had set aside to read during the holidays. Once I started, I decided rather than reading through this little book in a few days, I would deliberately try to read just one essay every few days, so while I started this book during the Christmas season, it was well into the new year before I closed the book on the final essay.

Fadiman is the author of Ex Libris, a book beloved by many book lovers, and At Large and At Small is a worthy companion to the earlier volume. She begins the book by explaining what a familiar essay is and when it was most popular, and why some have lamented its imminent demise.  I enjoyed each essay to some degree, although there were a few that stood out as favorites. In “The Unfuzzy Lamb” she describes her adoration of Charles Lamb and what it is about his life and his writing that inspire devotion in his fans. This was probably about the sixth book I’ve read in the last few months that reference Charles Lamb. As I said in an earlier post, I took this as a sign, and ordered a used copy of The Essays of Elia through the Amazon Marketplace. Strangely, even though Lamb seems adored by many, his works are out of print. My pristine used copy arrived today and I’m looking forward to reading it.

In “Mail” she talks about the anticipation of getting the mail, the excitement it produces when there is more than bils and junk mail, and the dying (or dead, depending on who you ask) art of letter-writing. Growing up, I had more than twenty penpals from around the world which I acquired one by one through International Youth Service, which is, sadly, no more. One of those penpals turned into my very dear friend, Giuseppe, who has been part of my life for more than twenty years. Nowadays we communicate through e-mail or Facebook, but I sometimes look wistfully back upon those days when I would wait anxiously for weeks for a letter to arrive in the mail.

The only essay I didn’t particularly care for was the last one, about a canoe trip she took when she was younger in which a young man drowned. The essay was heartfelt and eloquent, but it’s somber tone didn’t really fit in with the rest of the book. Overall the collection is a pleasurable read, by turns whimsical, enlightening and witty, essays that I will read again, in a book that will have a permanent place on my bookshelf.

With twelve essays, At Large and At Small marks my first foray into the Essay Reading Challenge.

Like several of the books that get added to my ever-growing wishlist, Nick Hornby’s The Polysyllabic Spree came to me by way of Bybee, who raved about it on her blog back in January. I had it on my list since that time, but it wasn’t until late last month (yes, I am that behind on blog posts) that I finally got my hands on a copy and found out why it was that I added it to my list in the first place. Spree is a collection of monthly essays Hornby wrote for the Believer magazine between September 2003 and November 2004. Like many booklovers, I am a sucker for books about books but I can’t say I’ve come across one written with the same wit and self-deprecating humor as Hornby does. I learned, I laughed and I added even more books to my wishlist.

What did I learn? Well, among other things, that Wilkie Collins wrote a book called No Name. While reading the chapter in which Hornby is loving the book, I made a note to add it to my list. But then, in the following month, he was fooled by the early chapters of No Name, which became an excruciating reading experience.  I promptly crossed it off my list. I also learned about the bands The Polyphonic Spree and Marah – the latter now added to my list of fan pages on Facebook.

What made me laugh? A lot. One particularly memorable bit was his description of meeting St. Peter at the pearly gates, and Hornby’s hope that he will be judged on the books he has bought versus the books he actually read. I’m glad I am not alone in continually adding books to my personal library, knowing there are some I will never read and that I will never have time to read them all. Perhaps the next time my husband questions yet another book purchase, I can point this out to him.

Hornby also has me considering some writers whose works I’ve never attempted. First among them is Charles Dickens. Yes, I can hear the audible gasps now, but I’ve never read anything by the venerable author, although I see that changing in my near future. If Nick Hornby thinks he’s the greatest writer that ever lived, then I think I need to at least give the man and his verbosity a chance. Anton Chekhov, and actually Russian authors in general, have always intimidated me. I’ve elevated him and his brethren to an almost mythological status, and in so doing have told myself that I could never read their works and understand them, much less actually enjoy them. But at one point, Hornby is reading Chekhov’s letters, and even shares an excerpt. What I found is a refreshingly accessible writer, whose words and sentiments are not only comprehensible, but entertaining.

Lastly is Charles Lamb – although Hornby really only makes passing reference to him, it seems like practically everything I’ve read in the past few months mentions that man – last night I was reading one of my current books, Immoveable Feast, and there he was again. If that’s not a sign that I need to read something by Lamb, I don’t know what is.

So what books did I add to my wishlist? Quite a few: How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer; George and Sam: Two Boys, One Family, and Autism by Charlotte Moore; So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance by Gabriel Zaid; This Is Serbia Calling: Rock ‘n’ Roll Radio and Belgrade’s Underground Resistance by Michael Collin; How Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World: A Short History of Modern Delusions by Francis Wheen; and Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. Like Bybee, Hornby is my latest literary crush, and so I didn’t even bother adding the next installment in his Believer essays series to my wishlist; Housekeeping vs. the Dirt is sitting on my nightstand, ready and waiting for me.