"the client," by john grisham

+ and i happened to bring a number of books with me to reno, in april. i started a series, reading the first chapter or so, on the first legs, vancouver to seattle and seattle to reno, and i settled on "an empire wilderness" by robert kaplan, a history and analysis of the american west as told through travelogue. a road-trip book that wasn't really about the road at all.

the most important lesson is that the american west, more than any other region, owes its existence as an extension of the empire to government money, first and foremost. huge piles of federal cash, thrown into canals and aqueducts and highways and all manner of maps are all that still allow this sprawling bastion of individualism to blossom and maintain some strange thrall over our identity as a continent.

a weekend, in a hotel room, i read for several hours and then left, i left to drink beer and watch americans watching basketball and to keep reading, in the bar and on the bus.

on my boarding pass, to come back, it said *CHECK ID*, just like that, with stars. i hid, on the plane, i kept reading to hide from the two endodontists on their way to the endodonics convention.

+ i saw "the client," by john grisham, on the seat of a car in the safeway parking lot. walking to work, to the skytrain that would take me to the coffee shop next to where i work.

goodbye baseball

+ i have come to treat my bookshelves as a sort of bank account. i keep a balance of available books, i spend it through reading. i buy books to keep my balance up. or maybe a bomb shelter, or pantry. i monitor my supply, keep an eye on what i have on deck, what books i have lined up in the bullpen. i warm them up, a few test pitches. read a page or two from the middle somewhere, decontextualised, is this what i'm up for at this point in time.

i pull out old books, books i've read and dated, and check them, do i remember them? sometimes i don't. sometimes i have no idea what a book was, even though i've dated it, Oct. 2004

+ four new books today.

blood meridian, or the evening redness in the west by cormac mccarthy. i have not read his books before, but for some reason jan is collecting all these books of his. i'm curious, and it was in perfect condition.

blindness, by jose saramago. i remember, very vividly, looking at this in 1999 or so in a bookstore, along with don delillo's underworld. i was looking to expand past genre fiction and the books already around me, so i looked at the 'serious' shelves in the mall bookstore, the modern fiction. through cover art and clever synopses, those two stood out. i remembered don delillo, and tracked his books down by 2001, and now i have them all. i remembered blindness too, but i never bothered to track it down, somehow. there it was, today, and only $10.

peace shall destroy many by rudy wiebe. a mennonite author from saskatchewan, writing about a mennonite community on the prairies during world war II. written in 1962.

and this book by an author named terri jentz, called strange piece of paradise: a return to the american west to investigate my attempted murder and solve the riddle of myself, which is a great title. it's why i bought the book, i saw the title somewhere on the internet and then tracked down some reviews. at the bookstore, the guy said, 'that's a great book, really fantastic.' it really is a murder investigation, this woman's memoir of being attacked by a madman in an oregon campsite 30 years ago and trying, now, to figure out what the hell happened.

+ my favourite book from the summer to date is probably alex driving south, by keith maillard. a $2 'canadian classic' paperback from the discount bin outside bibliophile books on commercial. a vicious, fantastic little book. a day, and really a lifetime, in west virginia. an absolutely fantastic book.

+ at the baseball game, a home run, and they put the words up on the little screen, goodbye baseball!!. yeah, it's outta there. but we thought there was another home run, no, the ball just bounced of the wall, painted white. it disappeared, and then the play kept going, the ball came back to the infield, the runner stopped at first.

exit signs

+ i do miss what i used to do, but it's not like that. i miss what i did. not who, or where, or how, necessarily. but what i did, sure, i loved it. i'm not even clear on what i do now.

+ i am reading michael ondaatje, the english patient. it's book that i never thought i'd read. i figured, hey, so many books, that's one i'll never read. at one point, in 2000 or 2001, i figured, hey, stereolab, so many bands, that's one i'll never listen to.

+ i keep my ipod at home, it's my second stereo, the kitchen radio. and on a hot day, i stay downstairs, i read on the couch. i use the kitchen radio. i leave it on 'shuffle', and i don't skip songs anymore, i listen to what i get. upstairs, with the full stereo, the desktop computer, i listen to albums, sometimes on repeat.

+ it's raining and the wind. the pinecones come off the tree next door and hit the patio, concrete tiles. i know what it looks like in surrey, where i was in surrey, the rain in the trees and moss. ferns and small paths.

the northwest corner

+ i finished don delillo's running dog and finally started to re-read george melnyk's new moon at batoche.
to note, this is the first book that i have re-read this summer.

i typed "george melnyk batoche" into google to see what would come up. i found a review from quill and quire that described it as an "intellectual autobiography," how lovely. then a lot of book selling websites. then a link to this website, something i wrote in 2006, september, about how much i wanted to read new moon at batoche again. well, august 2008, ok. but i've held on to this book for nearly four years now as one of my favourites, a book that i claim as a fundamental inspiration, a book that gave me a lens for the world. and this is always the fear, four years later, is it true, and yes, moreso than i knew. most of the tools and ideas i use to understand history are drawn from this book. the language is mine, somehow. i managed to internalise the style and pace along with the kernels and now, this is who i am.

i have waited almost as long to read sharon butala's lilac moon for the first time. that fall, 2004, the first paper i wrote that i was proud of, a comparison of george melnyk and sharon butala's views on the west, using melnyk's magpie and tortoise: regionalism in the two wests as a frame.

+ i read running dog in a day. i read a lot of it today at buntzen lake. i hiked up into the woods to hide and sat down on a log and read my book. i worry about the gluttony, i worry about 'bingeing,' as it were, on books, on favourite authors. but i find books that i'm desperate to read and i leave them waiting, sometimes for years, because i know i'll always have something waiting, something wonderful. this is the first summer that i've really indulged myself.

i read on my lunch breaks now, and i've never done that before. i take a book with me everywhere, i always did, but only now am i really making use of them.

+ i listened to yo la tengo, and then nothing turned itself inside out in 2001, 2002. walking across east van from downtown to commercial drive, walking down pender and then venables, it was something to do. and then in the fall of 2002, waiting for the bus, going home, my last semester as a student, my last semester going to class and going home.