The Toronto Public Library is down and out due to a cyberattack which has radically reduced its services for more than a month. Every reader in this city feels the cramp in their style. The book-hating criminals have also attacked the British Library, an even more gigantic book depot. The amazing system that serviced my book-gluttony will not revive this year. I might even have to (ulp) resort to buying books.
#85 in 2023
I had already stopped menstruating for several months by the time we started the Three Struggles of the Summer.Now I was bone-tired. Each time I shoved a clump of seedlings into the ground, the sandy soil tore my cuticles. The strain of bunking with nine others, the disruption of sleep cycles caused by work shifts that started at 4 am, midnight or 6 am, and a constant fear of failing at physical labor converged to give me insomnia.
I was a guest at the 10th anniversary of Canadaland, a popular podcast series, and I was starstruck by the woman sitting beside me: the formidable journalist Jan Wong, who used to report from China for the Globe & Mail. We began to chat and I confessed that as an undergraduate, I’d had a crush on Mao. “Me too!” she cried. I’d believed (I told her) that while the Soviet Union had failed miserably, Communist China was the path to a socialist utopia. “Me too!” she chimed in again, cheeks aglow. I even joined the Canada-China Friendship society for a while, I said. Another “me too” from Jan Wong. And then our stories diverged. While I dropped out of the role of a useful idiot, cowed by the prospect of learning Mandarin, Jan Wong drank the Maoist Kool-aid by the gallon. She left Canada to study and work in China as a true believer. That’s the eye-popping story of Red China Blues: My Long March From Mao to Now.
Wong is a topnotch journalist who tells her story efficiently and relentlessly. The most shocking revelation is that she was so brainwashed that she actually snitched on a fellow student, ruining that person’s life. (She writes about that mistake in another book called Beijing Confidential.) By the end of the memoir, Wong has lost all her illusions, works as a reporter, and lands in the middle of the massacre on Tienanmen Square in 1989.
I do not regret that I dug ditches or mixed cement or harvested rice -- or that I studied Mao and Lenin and Marx. I am glad I never had Mao's image tattoed on my bicep, the way an admiring Mike Tyson did while serving time for rape in an Indiana prison. I was duped, conned, suckered by Maoism. ... To paraphrase Tennyson, 'tis better to have believed and lost than never to have believed at all. Those years taught me about who I am, and what kind of world I want to live in... If you tell someone in Toronto that you think freedom and democracy are wonderful, they give you a strange look, as if you are raving about how nice oxygen is.
#86 in 2023
Quick, name a novel by a Greek author. No, the Iliad and Antigone don’t count. If you’re like me, you’ll draw a blank, except for, maybe, Nikos Kazantzakis and only his one book, and the soundtrack that goes along with it, a tune inspiring a million drunken dances after too many shots.
In other words, you know as many Greek authors as you know Latvian ones, maybe even less. Dab some knowledge on your ignorance with a classic Greek novella by Alexandros Papadiamentes. The Murderess was originally published in 1903, and thanks to New York Review Books was published in English a mere eighty years later (translated by Peter Levi). Not a lot of dancing in this story, which is all about what happens when you make the big mistake of being born a female in Greece. You’re better off dead — need I say more?
The main character is an old woman who spends a lot of time scrambling through the mountains and the olive groves. This taut story will be of special interest, therefore, to anyone who likes to grapple with a rock face, or the patriarchy, whichever comes first.
#87 in 2023
At a time when dastardly criminals and right-wing politicians attack libraries, it is a joy to read Anthony Doerr’s great big love letter to books and librarians, Cloud Cuckoo-land. There is no Netflix version of this book yet and secretly I hope there won’t be, because the whole point of Doerr’s story is the impact of words upon the imagination.
The book is about an ancient story that crosses six centuries to help people survive, and to anyone who writes and reads or translates and is, like you and me, bookish, what can be more seductive?
He remembers a tale Grandfather once told about a book left behind by the old gods when they fled the earth. This book, Grandfather said, was locked inside a golden box, which was in turn locked inside an iron mold, inside a wooden chest, and the gods placed the chest at the bottom of a lake, and set water-dragons a hundred feet long swimming around it that not even the bravest men could kill.
At first I thought that the choppy structure of this book would wear me out, that I wouldn’t remember the characters: the kid in the space ship, the shooter with OCD, the old man directing a kids’ show at the library, the servant girl who learns to read in Istanbul, the boy with the harelip (how I sorrowed for his oxen, Moonlight and Tree). But once I got used to Doerr’s style —— even if a little too cute, a tad gooey — I was hooked, and I ripped through the book to the end.
#88 in 2023
All of us who spend our lives in theater know that, at its core, this performing art is sacred. It has an incredible capacity for illuminating the unseen, reshaping history, bringing out empathy and providing social commentary.
This is how the director Kate Whoriskey introduces the award-winning play Ruined, by Lynn Nottage. Director and playwright had wanted to do a version of Brecht’s Mother Courage set in the Congo, to bring international attention to the wartorn country. Eventually they ditched Brecht and wrote a play of their own, focusing on the suffering of the raped and trafficked women in a frightening story set in a brothel-cum-bar.
MAMA: Things slip from our fingers like butter. No. When I was eleven, this white man with skin the color of wild berries turned up with a piece of paper. It say he have rights to my family land. (With acid) Just like that. Taken! … Everyone talk diamonds, but I … I want a powerful slip of paper that says I can cut down forests and dig holes and build to the moon if I choose.
All the stories told in the play border on unbearable. It raises the question of the ethics of making intense suffering into entertainment. Does that wake people up, the way these artists hope? Or does the vicarious experience of trauma distance you, rather than pull you close? Ruined keeps the violence mostly offstage., and Nottage has won more prizes and accolades than I can count. She wrote the award-winning play based on her interviews with Congolese refugee women in 2004 and 2005 who wanted to go on record as survivors, not victims. She wants you to check out the work she does with her husband in documentaries. You can find it here.
#89 in 2023
It took me a while to realize that the memoir Out of the Blue: A Memoir of Workplace Depression, Recovery, Redemption, and, Yes, Happiness was self-published. I did a double-take since, after all, Jan Wong has published a lot with Doubleday. She is the same illustrious journalist whom I met at a fête, (see above) the former China correspondent for the Globe&Mail.
And there lies the rub: Wong’s story is about the catastrophic impact of a single article she wrote for the renowned national paper, leading to the kind of heinous calumny that many women who are public figures are forced to endure, a daily avalanche of hate mail, including a death threat. Wong fell into a clinical depression for two years and since she is a journalist whose primary motive in life is to communicate with others, this is her own tell-all about what depression is like.; how it affects her self, her children, her husband, her friends and her erstwhile colleagues. Wong was a reporter for the Globe for twenty years and much of the book consists of her subsequent struggle with the people running that newspaper. The conflict turned so bad that they sent out a security agency to surreptitiously videotape her, in an effort to prove that she wasn’t really depressed.
Wong took quite a leap in her life, from a fierce Maoist revolutionary dedicated to a spartan existence to becoming someone who has the wherewithal to splurge $1,900 on refinishing her mahogany dining room table. Though at times her stories of excess, however self-critical, put me off, I was gripped by her honesty. It was worth reading to the very end to find out why the book was self-published.
Depression isn’t a uniquely American illness. It transcends national borders, cultures and languages. It strikes people anywhere, everywhere and anytime, whether they know about the symptoms of the disease or not. Ignorance about depression is pervasive, no matter what country you live in.
Currently I’m reading: Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, 1924
For the last two weeks, I have not abandoned a single book.
**
To all my new subscribers: welcome. I choose what I read based on suggestions and recommendations whic have turned into a lottery of some 5,000 books. Every few weeks I make a new list of ten books to read. This is what’s left on it at the moment:
Second Latest Saved: Jacob Mikanowski, Goodbye, Eastern Europe: an intimate history of a divided land, 2023 (sitting on my shelf, Antanas)
Reader Recommended: Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, a memoir, 2023 (thank you, Graham; might have to buy it!)
Actually, don’t bother placing bets. Who cares if I make it to one hundred?
It’s just a number.