No time to write, so you get a list

I've been reading a lot lately, but I don't have time to blog about it at the moment, so I'll just list the books I've read lately and blog about them later:

• Elizabeth Smart: By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
• Northrop Frye: The Great Code
• Northrop Frye: Anatomy of Criticism
• John Ayre: Northrop Frye
  
• Donna Hay: Off the Shelf
• Steven Pratt: Superfoods Rx
• Steven Pratt: Superfoods Healthstyle
• Al Gore: An Inconvenient Truth

As you can see, most of the reading has been for my thesis, but when I've got time, I'll tell you about it. It's quite interesting.

Charlotte Gray- Mrs. King: The Life & Times of Isabel Mackenzie King; Sisters in the Wilderness: The Lives of Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill

I decided to do a double post for these ones, as they are both by Charlotte Gray, and both are histories of major women in Canadian history. As I stated when I wrote about Reluctant Genius, I really quite enjoy Charlotte Gray's biographies. Canadian history, as all of my international students last summer assured me, is really boring and dull. I'm not sure how much I agree with that, but I do enjoy leaning about it through the lives of interesting people more than I enjoy reading history books. Reading about women is even better, for their experiences are ones that often get forgotten in the writing of history.

I was especially interested in reading Sisters in the Wilderness because of how central Susanna Moodie and Catharine Parr Traill are to my field of work, which is modern Canadian poetry. The Bush Garden, Northrop Frye's collection of essays about Canadian art, which I believe was the last book that I blogged about, takes its title from the writings of Moodie. Margaret Atwood uses the two extensively as characters in her poetry, and the whole trope of the threatening and inhuman Canadian landscape throughout Canadian literature essentially begins with them. I often find myself reading Anne Wilkinson's "green order," her attempts to create a green world which she then transforms into, as her way of speaking against Moodie and Parr Traill's visions of the Canadian landscape and her way of humanizing it. Aside from all of that, I wanted to know more about what exactly they did experience when they, two cultivated English ladies, arrived in a Canada that was essentially untouched by humanity. I can't imagine what I would do if I had to go through what they did--giving birth alone in a log cabin, living on potatoes for the whole winter, not being able to clothe or properly educate your children--but Gray makes it vividly imaginable. It also fascinates me that neither Moodie or Parr Traill allowed the hardships of their lives to diminish the need that they felt to write. I'm considering trying to formulate a PhD dissertation around the subject of motherhood and writing in Canada, and these two are the prime example of the ways in which it can be done.

Mrs. King I picked up because I was enjoying Gray so much that I wanted to continue reading her. I vaguely remembered hearing something about William Lyon Mackenzie King's Oedipal complex when I was in school, but that was about all I knew about Mrs. King. Let me tell you--this woman was quite something. Her father was William Lyon Mackenzie, the famous rebel, her husband was useless, and her son was the Prime Minister of Canada. Out of all of these men, she was the type to attach herself to the one who could do the most for her; hence, her strange relationship with her son. From the letters that they exchanged, F.R. Scott and Dennis Lee's poems about Mackenzie King sound about accurate; she used to show him her underwear for his approval, and I don't know how much times have changed, but from today's perspective, that's just strange. It was quite an interesting book though, and I'm definitely going to find more by Gray, as reading her is an enjoyable way to learn.

Northrop Frye- The Bush Garden: Essays on the Canadian Imagination

A book for my thesis; one of the first that I've posted on here, although I've already read quite a few. This one is a collection of Frye's writings about Canadian literature and art. It contains his reviews of poetry for the "Letters in Canada" series for the University of Toronto Quarterly (very useful to me, as he reviews Anne Wilkinson's collections in 1951 and 1955), as well as a number of seminal essays on Canadian literature, including his "Conclusion" to Carl Klinck's The Literary History of Canada, and Preface to an Uncollected Anthology, where he imagines that, without the constraints of money or copyright, he has collected the ultimate anthology of Canadian poetry and is writing the introduction to it. I love this book because it is about my beloved Canada and my beloved Canadian writing, and because Frye's love for the art of his homeland shines through loud and clear. I know and love the work that he's talking about, and it's such a treat, in this day and age where Canadian content is legislated, rather than celebrated, to hear that love coming from someone as great as Frye, however long ago he wrote it.