Just last night I was feeling smug about having dodged this particularly bullet. Then…thunk. Nailed by soon-to-be-Juno-Award-Winning singer-songwriter (oh, yeah, and blogger too) Jim Bobby. Okay. The Great Canadian Literary Confessional. Bless me, father, for I have read…

Number of books owned:

Dunno. A few thousand. Reading is my favourite leisure activity, and both Mrs. B. and I are packrats when it comes to our books: we never give anything away. Consequently we have fourteen large bookcases that occupy about 1/3 of the available floorspace in our house, overflowing with decaying yellow jacketed DAW science fiction paperbacks, old editions of encyclopedias, bound comic collections, old European herbals, manuals on conjuring…and fiction. Lotsa fiction.

Last Book Purchased:

Ghosts of Cape Sabine, Leonard Guttridge. I collect accounts of Arctic and Antarctic exploration, and I was lucky enough to find a hardcover edition of this on sale at a used bookstore on Thursday. An extremely well written account of one of the mostly ghastly northern expeditions. A seriously underqualified US officer, Lieutenant Adolphus Greeley, led an expedition to the northern tip of Ellesmere Island. Through a series of mishaps and political games (including the intervention of President Lincoln’s son Robert) they were stranded, and finally had to…well, read it. Murder, cannibalism, insanity, last minute rescue attempts…this has it all.

Last Book I read:

Apart from the Silver Palate Cookbook, which I read last night (at least the part about Warm Lemon Chicken Salad), the last book I finished was Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”. It’s one of those ones I always thought I HAD read, having seen so many film versions (from “Roadkill” to “Apocalypse Now”).

Five Books that mean a lot to me:

The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell. I don’t have a mystical bone in my body. But this comparative analysis of the world’s great myths, based on Campbell’s voluminous reading and his own interpretation of the concept of Jungian archetypes, knocked me flat when I first read it twenty years ago, and changed the way I thought about religion, art, consciousness, writing, and perception. I reread it about three years ago, and it has aged exceedingly well. As have I, of course.

The Historical Atlas of Canada. This amazing three volume set tells the history of Canada in maps, charts and illustrations. And I mean EVERY aspect of history…the layout of a buffalo killing jump, street maps of Forth Louisbourg, distribution and trade routes, construction diagrams for a Quebec City manor house of the 17th century. It is one of the most attractive and engrossing books I’ve owned.

Ficciones, by Jorge Luis Borges. It’s impossible to describe what Borges does in his stories, partly because very few of them are “stories” in any conventional sense. Most are essays about fictional people, or imaginary institutions (like an imaginary library that contains every possible combination of every alphanumeric character known to man) , or tigers, or labyrinths (real and philosophical), all so packed with ideas that you savour every paragraph a like a rich liqueur. Unlike so so many of the authors who followed in his footsteps, Borges LOVED literature and storytelling. Read this and you’ll see where John Barth, David Foster Wallace, and many of today’s lame post-modernists stole their chops from.

The Penguin Complete Poems of Rudyard Kipling, by…well, figure it out. Poor Kipling has taken a beating in this politically correct world, and his notion of the White Man’s Burden to rescue “Lesser Breeds” made him a bit of an embarassment. Which is too bad, because when you read his entire work, you realize what an insightful, profound, and funny man man he was, how widely ranging was his intellect, and how deeply he ran against the grain of Victorian consciousness (his poems about the common soldier made him a favourite among the British Tommies). And even his love of empire is tempered throughout by a very ironic awareness of the evils of colonialism and an appreciation for other peoples and cultures.

“The Cornish Trilogy“, by Robertson Davies. My favorite trilogy by my favorite Canadian novelist. After reading Davies you have the dazed impressions of having spent a month watching the world through the eyes of a much wiser you. All three volumes are wondrous in their own way, although my personal preference is “What’s Bred in the Bone”, which provides wonderful tips for art forgers, a great portrait of an early twentieth century Ontario, dialogue between two rather nasty guardian angels, and useful hints on embalming. But read the whole trilogy, or you’ll miss Gypsy Maria and her mom.

And now…the Tagging. Because I’m genuinely curious, I tag:

- Stageleft
- Mike Brock
- Peter Rempel
- Japnaam Singh
- Vinny