#roly bain

November/December 2016: How Time Works on a Person  

Books Bought

None

Books Borrowed

Medicine Walk by Richard Wagamese @bklynlibrary

Fun House: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel @bklynlibrary

Playing the Fool by Roly Bain @bklynlibrary

Moxyland by Lauren Beukes @bklynlibrary

The Invoice by Jonas Karlsson @bklynlibrary

How To Talk To Girls At Parties by Neil Gaiman, Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá @bklynlibrary

Train Dreams by Denis Johnson @bklynlibrary​

Heroes OF The Frontier by Dave Eggers @bklynlibrary

The Baltimore Atrocities by John Dermot Woods @bklynlibrary

War & Turpentine by Stefan Hertmans @bklynlibrary

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch @bklynlibrary

The Regional Office is Under Attack by Manuel Gonzalez @bklynlibrary

Books Read˜

Medicine Walk by Richard Wagamese 

Heroes of The Frontier by Dave Eggers 

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch 

Fun House: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel 

Playing the Fool by Roly Bain 

The Invoice by Jonas Karlsson

Where'd You Go Bernadette by Maria Semple

How To Talk To Girls At Parties by Neil Gaiman, Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá

(at least half of) The Regional Office is Under Attack by Manuel Gonzalez 

As an educator, November 8, 2016 was the worst day of my life (as it showed my nation as one uninterested in logic, reasoning, and facts), and not surprisingly my retreat into books was swift and total. Of all of them, Richard Wagamese’s Medicine Walk was the standout. It’s a sparse, haunting book of a son traveling by horseback with his dying father. The prose, particularly in descriptions of the natural world, is simple and strong, while the story of the father sharing with his son how he came to be the man he is, is grim and tragic. Near the end, the son mulls over what he’s learned:

He thought about everything he’d been told. It was grim but more than he had before...He wondered how time worked on a person. He wondered how he would look years on and what effect this history would have on him. He’d expected that it might have filled him but all he felt was emptiness and a fear that there would be nothing that could fill that void. His thoughts turned toward (his father) and there was only pity there for a life with benchmarks that only ever set out the boundaries of pain and loss, woe and regret, nothing to bring him comfort in his last days. He thought of his lost mother, and wondered how it might have felt to touch her, to put a hand or the other on her shoulder and claim some of her energy as his own, or if, as an infant, enough of her spirit had clung to him despite all the lean years of absence to carry him forward without loneliness. He hoped so. His life was built on the stories of vague ghosts. He wanted desperately to see them fleshed out and vital. History, he supposed, lacked that power. He rubbed his palms together slowly then held them out to the fire. (pg. 232)

Wagamese, a prolific Canadian writer deserves more of an audience with goods this polished. 

As for Dave Egger’s latest, Heroes of the Frontier, it’s funny when describing the peaks and valleys of middle age mundanity. Here is just a snippet of a multi-page tour de force describing the main character’s normal day: 

Now at 40, Josie was tired. She was tired of her journey through a day, the limitless moods contained in any stretch of hours. There was the horror of morning, underslept, feeling like she was on the precipice of something that felt like mono, the day already galloping away from her, her chasing on foot, carrying her boots. Then the brief upward respite after a second cup of coffee, when all seemed possible, when she wanted to call her father, her mother, reconcile...Then, after the kids were gone, an eleven-minute mood freefall, then more coffee, and more euphoria until the moment, arriving at her practice, when the coffee had worn off and she grew, for an hour or so, more or less numb, doing her work in a state of underwater detachment. (pg. 21-22)