Author: Charles-Adam Foster-Simard

Our Christmas Menu

Posted on by Charles-Adam Foster-Simard

Like so many people around the world, we spent the 2020 Holidays far from our families. In fact, it was the first time I’ve ever spent Christmas away from my family and outside of Québec. G. and I decided to make the best of the situation, and we spent much of December decorating, shopping, and planning our own Christmas celebrations.

The rules in France allowed for up to six people to meet for dinner on Christmas Eve — the only day during the current “lockdown” period when the usual 8 p.m. curfew was lifted. We invited four of our friends over to our apartment, dressed the table with vintage crystal and porcelain and heaps of wintry leaves, and planned an extra-special meal for the occasion.

We hesitated at first about what exactly we wanted to cook. I initially had an idea for a traditional, vegetarian British-style Christmas meal with a nut roast, roasted potatoes, a parsnip purée, and gravy. G. on the other hand wanted to make a saumon en croûte, a sort of salmon wellington, which felt festive and special. But in the end, and after consulting with some French people like G.’s hairdresser, we felt it was more appropriate to go down the traditional French route, which means seafood and foie gras. The added advantage was that we could easily order things, prepare what needed to be prepared in advance, and the meal itself required almost no cooking.

Our feast started with a specially crafted Christmas cocktail. I love making up cocktails for specific occasions, so I thought long and hard about what I wanted to make for Christmas this year. I went down the route of the whiskey sour, feeling that the citrus element was nice and sharp to start the meal, and there was something quite cheerful about the foamy egg white. To make it more seasonal I used some bergamot juice in addition to the lemon juice, and I infused my simple syrup with ginger and bergamot peel as well to get more depth of flavour. The make it more festive I finished it with a star anise floating in the froth. It was delicious and a nice way to welcome our guests.

Although we wanted to go down the traditional French route with our meal, we started with an exotic twist: as one of our friends is from Columbia, his partner wanted to treat him to some Columbian snacks, so the appetizers were traditional Columbian goodies she had ordered from a specialist caterer in Paris: empanads, pan de bonos, patacones, and yuca fries. We ate these tasty snacks with some Pierre Gimonnet champagne we picked up in Epernay when we went there for a weekend back in the fall, before France returned in lockdown.

We then sat down for our feast of the sea. We had ordered oysters from a local restaurant that has converted itself to selling baskets of dairy products, fruit & veg, and seafood from their producers while the restaurant is closed. Langoustines with spicy mayo and scallop sashimi came from Sur Mer, another local restaurant that currently offers takeaway meals and seafood platters. The scallop, served raw, thinly sliced in its shell and accompanied with its sharp little dressing, was definitely one of the highlights.

I had prepared two fish elements the day before: salmon gravlax and a smoked haddock rillette. I love making salmon gravlax and I find it to be a perfect Holiday appetizer, and I’ve made some in the past with juniper, gin, and beetroot which tints the salmon flesh a beautiful pink colour. But this year I wanted a cleaner, fresh taste so I went with lemon zest, pink peppercorn, and a little bit of ground coriander seeds as my aromatics. It was delicious sliced very thin on bitter red and white endive leaves with little dollops of crème fraîche with some lemon zest and chives mixed in it. The smoked haddock rillette was something I’d never done before, and I don’t quite know where I got the idea for it but it seemed right, and it ended up being one of the more popular things on our menu! I simply bought some smoked haddock fillet, I cooked them gently in milk, then flaked the flesh and mixed it with some home made mayonnaise, a bit of lemon juice, pepper, and a chopped chives. Delicious spread on some croutons!

In addition, I also picked up some duck mi-cuit foie gras at the Grande Épicerie when I went to do some Christmas shopping there earlier in December, so I served some of that on toast with dabs of onion chutney and cherry compote. Our friend also brought some fois gras along so we had more than enough and I still have some leftover in the fridge.

G. loves the British tradition of Christmas crackers, and she wanted to make them extra special this year so she ordered some that came still open and only had the joke and the paper crowns in them. We filled them with some nougats and caramel au beurre salé from George Larnicol, our favorite chocolatier. G. also prepared a special surprise for the digestif: she filled little glass bottles with a selection of brown alcohols — for example calvados, whiskey, rum and armagnac — then numbered and sealed the bottles with wax. We each had to guess what alcohol we had. As it turned out, only one of us got it right! It was a fun game to add some entertainment and joy to the evening, in addition to a more traditional blind gift exchange.

After a cheese course of Morbier and Mont d’Or, we dug into our bûche: a classic French Christmas dessert (also traditional in Québec) which is basically a cake in the form of a log, which can often be rolled. My mother usually makes a delicious chocolate, mint, and vanilla ice-cream bûche for Christmas, and I toyed with the idea of trying to make it, but I decided that I could never make anything as good as what I could buy in Paris!

Every chocolatier, bakery, and pastry shop has their own selection of bûche and I spent a good part of December agonizing about which one I wanted, comparing designs and flavour profiles, until I decided to contact our favourite pâtisserie shop, Muscade, located in the Jardin du Palais-Royal. They’re particularly good at adding modern twists to traditional desserts. It turned out that they did have a Christmas bûche that fit what we were looking for: inspired by a Mont Blanc, it had a bit of meringue with lots of chestnut mousse and cream, and some sharp passion fruit gel in the middle to offset the sweetness. It was the right choice and the perfect way to end the meal.

Although we were very sad not to be able to spend precious time with our families this year, it was nice to be able to organize the celebration we wanted (within the restrictions, of course) and make the most of some of the beautiful products and traditions of France. Given the circumstances, we wanted to organize a party that was fun and memorable, and I think we managed it!

A Decade in Books: 2019

Posted on by Charles-Adam Foster-Simard

When I look at the list of books I read in 2019 I feel a little disappointed because I find that I didn’t finish enough books: 26, which averages to one every two weeks. I could blame work, I could blame writing, I could blame a commute that’s just a little too short (that would be silly, no one complains their commute is too short), I could blame podcasts. But in the end, I just have to remind myself that it’s not how many books you read in the year that matters, but whether or not they were any good.

2019 is the year I joined a book club here in Paris, something I’d never really done before. That’s what led me to read Saramago’s The Gospel According to Jesus Christ and Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda. There’s a certain joy to reading and discussing books you wouldn’t necessarily have picked up otherwise. I went through a short-lived Saramago phase when I was eighteen, so I was eager to read more of his work, but I have to say his novel about Jesus did not quite enthral me as much as I thought it would. I hope I won’t be put off from reading more of his novels, since there are many others that look interesting. As for Peter Carey, well I’d never read him before but I had heard a lot about him — booker favourite that he is — so I was excited to finally getting around to his work. The irony, in fact, is that because of some scheduling issue I couldn’t actually make it to the book club meeting where Oscar and Lucinda was discussed, although I did in fact finish the novel. I liked it a lot, although it’s a shame I didn’t get to discuss it because it raised many questions for me. For instance, I wondered why it took so long before the two main characters got to meet… And I couldn’t help but be overwhelmingly impressed with Carey’s imagination and verve, his ability to build a completely believable 19th century world, populated by a cast of insanely Dickensian characters, in England and in Australia. I cannot wait to read more of Carey’s books, especially his other Booker winner: True History of the Kelly Gang.

When I look at the books I read at the end of the decade, I see three beautiful, overlapping trilogies: Rachel Cusk’s Outline series, which broke new ground in auto-fiction and wonderfully smart feminist rage; N.K. Jemisin’s fantasy series The Broken Earth, about a collapsing world and a broken family; and Cixin Liu’s breathtaking, messy science fiction trilogy The Remembrance of Earth’s Past. When I was reading Cusk, I felt like whole new avenues for fiction and storytelling were opening up. For the most part I wondered how she could write something so compelling with a narrator who, for the most part, erases herself in the face others and their stories. Jemisin’s trilogy captivated me, especially the first book which plays so cleverly with timelines and characters. The world she creates and the emotional themes she delves into — especially around loss — are beautiful and terrifying. As for Liu, the high-level concepts and pieces of incredible technology he describes in his books — and which he manages to do it in a very clear, understandable way — is mind-blowing, for lack of a better term. I felt like he forced my brain, and the possibilities it could muster, to expand.

What else? Well, 2019 was the year that Margaret Atwood weirdly won the Booker again (jointly this time) for her sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale. The Testaments was a storm of a book, but I found it a little too drily plotted for my taste. Knowing that it was coming and that I would want to read it, though, I reread The Handmaid’s Tale in preparation, and what a pleasure that was. The world it creates still holds up so well, but it’s the language that makes that book a winner: the beautiful interiority of the narrator as she goes about her dreadful days, wondering and worrying.

2019 is also the year I got around to reading Proust for the first time. I was always a bit daunted by Proust but I had a feeling that I would end up loving his work. My dream has often been to spend an entire summer out in the country somewhere, lazily but unwaveringly making my way through À la recherche. Alas, what a disappointment! There were one or two bits of the first novel that I did enjoy, but I found the rest exceedingly boring. My main complaint was that he seems to focus all his attention on the most mundane, boring things, and skips over every important plot point casually. It’s like he wants it to be about nothing. Maybe that’s the point, and if so I have to simply admit that, at this time in my life, Proust is beyond me.

The previous year, in 2018, when G. and I were living in Egypt, we read New Yorker articles by the extraordinary Peter Hessler, using them as keys to decipher aspects of Egyptian society: women, money & class, politics… His book The Buried sort of mashes together a bunch of that writing and weaves it with added material, creating a larger narrative about Egyptian society and setting the 2011 Revolution into historical trends, going all the way back to the time of the pharaohs. Hessler writes beautifully and his book is in turns funny and sad; I had a lot of fun reading it to G. at night before bed. It was a pleasure to rediscover some of the wonderful characters from his New Yorker articles in the book, like the epic tale of the neighbourhood garbage collector whom Hessler befriends, and who is locked in a years-long marital battle with his young, educated wife.

Soon the decade came to a close. We returned home, to Canada, for our usual two week trip for the holidays — unbeknownst to us, it was the last time we would be back home before the pandemic of 2020. The last book I read that year was Philip Pullman’s The Secret Commonwealth, in which he returns to the universe he created in The Golden Compass to continue the story of Lyra Belacqua, seven years after the events with which his trilogy His Dark Materials ended. I inhaled his new book, finding it absorbing and moving and beautifully written, bursting with imagination and wonder. It’s dark, of course, in some ways much darker than the original trilogy, at least in its psychology, but what it really was for me was a statement about the power of storytelling. It’s also a book about movement, travel, and meetings: a wonderful way to end a meandering decade.

Reading List: 2019

Keith Maillard, Twin Studies

Annie Ernaux, Les Années

Jim Shepard, The Book of Aron

Philippe Lançon, Le Lambeau

Eugène Dabit, L’Hôtel du Nord

Helen DeWitt, The Last Samurai

Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin of a Lion

Lawrence Wright, The Terror Years

Ian McEwan, Machines Like Me

Maurice Druon, Les Rois Maudits 1: Le Roi de fer

Gustave Flaubert, Bouvard et Pécuchet

Rachel Cusk, Kudos

Cixin Liu, Death’s End

Mitchell Abidor, May Made Me

Patrick Modiano, Rue des boutiques obscures

Ed. Mark Edele, Sheila F, A. Grosmann, Shelter from the Holocaust

Ted Chiang, Exhalation

N.K. Jemisin, The Obelisk Gate

Henryk Greenberg, Children of Zion (transl. J. Mitchell)

Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

José Saramago, The Gospel According to Jesus Christ

Peter Hessler, The Buried

Peter Carey, Oscar and Lucinda

Marcel Proust, Du côté de chez Swann

Margaret Atwood, The Testaments

Philip Pullman, The Book of Dust 2: The Secret Commonwealth

A Decade in Books: 2018

Posted on by Charles-Adam Foster-Simard

In early 2018 G. and I moved to Egypt, where were planning to stay for five or six months, although we were flexible and our future was, to put it casually, uncertain. We rented a flat on the sixteenth floor of a concrete apartment tower in Zamalek, an upscale neighbourhood located at the tip of an island in the Nile, with Cairo on one side and Giza on the other. G. worked on her thesis and visited museums while I entertained a vaguely formed idea to write journalism. I had a completed novel about Alexander the Great’s successors on my computer hard drive. It grew hotter and hotter as the weeks passed, and the AC units in our apartment started to break down one by one, until I spent most of my time in my underwear, either sitting at the ornate dining table sending out pitches to agents and editors, or lying on the sofa, my skin sticking to the dark green leather, reading books.

I read a lot in 2018 because I had time. Naturally, I read books about Egypt, many of which I wrote about in 2018 on this very blog. I discovered Robert Solé and Waguih Ghali and read about the history of Cairo and a novel about the 2011 revolution. I also read books I brought with me to Egypt and which had nothing to do with the country, for example the first books in two acclaimed trilogies, one science fiction and the other fantasy: N. K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season and Cixian Liu’s The Three Body Problem. I loved both of those books and read the sequels over the next couple of years.

To a degree living abroad means reading whatever you can get your hands on. There’s something charming about the serendipity of buying and reading what’s on offer locally. In Cairo I frequented the Zamalek branch of a bookstore called Diwan, which is well stocked in English-language books. That’s where I picked up, once I had read through the pile of books I had brought with me, LeGuin’s The Lathe of Heaven (surprising and moving) and Alice Munro’s Lives of Girls and Women (earth shattering) and, of all things, Daniel Deronda. Ever since I read Middlemarch when I was twenty years old I’ve had this vague idea of… well, first of all rereading Middlemarch, but also of working my way through all of Eliot’s novels. I’m not sure if I felt that was such a good plan anymore after slogging through Daniel Deronda, but then hanging out in my dusty hot apartment in Cairo without a job was perhaps the only time I’ll ever have in my life to actually read that loose baggy monster without giving it up, or without it taking me months. There are books like that (The Red & the Black comes to mind) where it’s just nice to be able to say that you read them. I can’t say I’m completely put off from Eliot, though; I’d like to pick up The Mill on the Floss someday.

In May my parents came to visit us and we showed them around Cairo before going to Upper Egypt to stay in Aswan and Luxor and see all the beautiful sights. I had heard Lisa Halliday talk on the New York Times Book Review podcast, so I had her book delivered to my parent’s house before their trip so they could bring it to me. I vividly remember devouring Asymmetry on the poolside at the the Old Cataract Hotel in Aswan — which happens to be one of the most beautiful pools I have ever been in. It was a bit too hot but it was a stunning place to read, with the aquamarine pool and the palm trees, the glint of the Nile, the feluccas sailing smoothly past, the rounded rocks and ruins of Elephantine island, and the desert beyond. That view is seared into my mind.

That summer G. and I returned to Quebec for a few months to get our lives in order before setting off to Paris in the fall, where G. had obtained a research fellowship. Our plans were more certain! Looking forward to our move to Paris, a city I had been to a couple of times when I was younger but didn’t really know that well, I reread Parisian favourites like Hemingway and Laurence Cossé, and I read Geoff Dyer’s Paris Trance and A Tale of Two Cities and Hilary Mantel’s great hefty novel about the French Revolution (read as another attempt to help wait for her last book in her Cromwell trilogy), A Place of Greater Safety. But the book I remember the most from that summer, a summer spent in Quebec at family cottages and seeing lots of animals like baby foxes and loons and deer and tadpoles, was Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek — a book about waiting, and watching, about gathering information about the world around you and spending a long time pondering it. It’s a beautiful book and it moved me deeply, in the truest sense of the word: it moved something in me, it shifted the way I think and feel and read and write.

In September we moved to Paris and, to our surprise, we fell in love with our neighbourhood, with the city. We hadn’t expected to be so charmed. I found a job within a month or two but in the meantime I had a few precious weeks of free time left to read great European novelists. I swallowed up books by Rachel Cusk and Patrick Modiano and W. G. Sebald. I reread The Ambassadors, one of the best novels ever written about Paris, which I had discovered 8 years earlier in a seminar on Henry James at the University of Bristol, and found just that little bit more dull the second time around. And I got to writing seriously again: I started a new novel set in different key periods in the 20th century, so I read about the 1919 Peace Conference and about how France and Britain divided up the Middle East in the wake of World War I. I picked up Colm Toibin’s beautiful novel Brooklyn in a used bookstore on the Left Bank (there is such a joy to buying and reading books that you’ve heard about for years and that you already know that you will enjoy). And then, when I did have a job and the weather cooled and autumn was dwindling to short, dark days, I read Elif Batuman’s extraordinary, loose, messy, hilarious novel The Idiot in the Metro on the way to and from work. And I finished the year almost as I had started it, reading Robert Solé, and dreaming about a hot dusty city baking under the sun.

Reading List: 2018

Laurent Binet, La septième fonction du language

Robert Solé, Une soirée au Caire

N. K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season

Oman Robert Hamilton, The City Always Wins

Amin Maalouf, Un fauteuil sur la Seine

Sebastian Barry, Days Without End

Diaries of Waguih Ghali: Volume 1 1964-1966

Joe M. McDermott, The Fortress at the End of Time

Emmanuel Carrère, D’autres vies que la mienne

Waguih Ghali, Beer in the Snooker Club

Salima Ikram, Ancient Egypt: An Introduction

Diaries of Waguih Ghali, Volume 2 1966-1968

Cixin Liu, The Three-Body Problem

Robert Solé, Le Tarbouche

The Essential Tawfiq Al-Hakim

George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

Ursula K. LeGuin, The Lathe of Heaven

Maurice Leblanc, La comtesse de Cagliostro

Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women

Lisa Halliday, Asymmetry

Max Rodenbeck, Cairo: The City Victorious

Julian Barnes, Levels of Life

Cixin Liu, The Dark Forest

Alberto Manguel, Packing my Library

Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

Laurence Cossé, Au bon roman

Natalie Morrill, The Ghost Keeper

Laurent Gaudé, Le tigre bleu de l’Euphrate

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety

Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Frank L. Holt, The Treasures of Alexander the Great

Geoff Dyer, Paris Trance

Robert Garland, Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

Katherine Dunn, Geek Love

James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk

Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities

Rachel Cusk, Outline

James Barr, A Line in the Sand

W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz

Rachel Cusk, Transit

Patrick Modiano, Dora Bruder

Craig Brown, Ma’am Darling

Margaret MacMillan, Paris 1919

Laurence Cossé, Nuit sur la neige

Colm Tóibín, Brooklyn

Henry James, The Ambassadors

Patrick Modiano, Un pedigree

Elif Batuman, The Idiot

Robert Solé, Le sémaphore d’Alexandrie

A Decade in Books: 2017

Posted on by Charles-Adam Foster-Simard

The list of books I read in 2017 isn’t very long. That year I was working long hours as a teacher, commuting to work by car, finishing a long novel I was writing about the successors of Alexander the Great. I read on weekends, in the evenings — and so never as much as I wanted to.

The year started with Chanson Douce, a troubling french novel that had won the Goncourt, France’s top literary prize, in 2016. The novel tells the story of a Parisian nanny who murders the children she takes care of. It’s extremely well done, a slow burn, psychologically acute study of class, privilege, and care.

I reread many books in 2017, a lot of them because I was teaching them: All Quiet on the Western Front, Maus, Cloud Atlas, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. I love all of these books, and I had picked them for that reason, and because teaching them gave the chance to revisit them. I also reread Mantel’s Wolf Hall, preparing myself for the third volume of her Cromwell trilogy which I knew would come sooner or later (it would be another three years!) and because I wanted to put her strong present tense voice back in my head to help me along with my own writing.

Strange to see Alice Munro’s Friend of My Youth in the list. Sometimes, reading my way through Alice Munro’s collections seems like a life’s work; I take so much joy knowing that I still have many of her books to read. And yet, I was just looking at the book on my shelves the other day — the one I have is a first edition hardcover I got at a used book sale — and thinking that I hadn’t read it yet. I have no memory of any of the stories inside and legitimately thought I’d never opened it before. Maybe I should revisit it too.

That fall G. and I returned home to Quebec for a week to visit family and meet my niece, who had been born in the summer. While there I read Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage, which had just come out: the book that introduces his new Book of Dust trilogy. I was glad to be able to review it for The Millions, but it meant I had to gulp it down fast to crank something out while it was still relevant. Thankfully, it’s a beautiful book and was well worth the ten-year wait since I’d first read His Dark Materials.

Near the end of 2017 it was becoming clearer that G. and I were planning our escape from California. I left my job and we hauled most of our belongings across the USA in a small blue Toyota Yaris, “storing” (read: dumping) them in my parents’ basement so we could go spend a few months in Cairo, Egypt, where G. had research to do for her PhD. My plan was to take this time off and abroad to write. I had about finished my book about Alexander the Great’s successors, so I wanted to find an agent and work on some non-fiction. That may be why I picked up two strong non-fiction books at the end of the year: Ta-Nahesi Coates’ masterful, messy collection of essays We Were Eight Years in Power, and John McPhee’s non-fiction masterclass Draft #4 (both of which had just come out).

I’m surprised I didn’t read more books about Egypt to prepare for the trip but I did pick up Yasmine El Rashidi’s novel Chronicle of a Last Summer; I knew the author from her very beautiful, thoughtful pieces about Egypt in the New York Review of Books. As it turned out, El Rashidi’s family house (which is described in the novel) was actually on the same street as the apartment building we ended up living in Cairo — but I didn’t know that yet as 2017 was drawing to a close).

To close: a few word on Red Sparrow, a thriller I picked up after hearing New Yorker editor David Remnick say he’d liked it. I read it to G. in the evenings before going to bed (the movie was going to come out a few months later) but unfortunately it wasn’t much to our taste. Perhaps we’re more on the team of John le Carré, who also appears on the list, with a book he published that year bringing back his wonderful character George Smiley after a long hiatus.

Reading List: 2017

Leïla Slimani, Chanson Douce

E. M. Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

Guy Delisle, S’enfuir

Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Aphrodite’s Tortoise

Mary Renault, The Persian Boy

Art Spiegelman, Maus

Elizabeth Carney, Women and Monarchy in Macedonia

Deborah Campbell, A Disappearance in Damascus

Stefan Hartmanns, War and Turpentine

Donald Engels, Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army

Bryher, Gate to the Sea

Daniel Pennac, Le Cas Mallaussène I: Ils m’ont menti

Nicolas Sekunda, Macedonian Armies after Alexander

Alice Munro, Friend of my Youth

Euripides, Bacchae

Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall

Alain Farah, La Ligne la plus sombre

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy

Yasmine El Rashidi, Chronicle of a Last Summer

Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

Robert Harris, Imperium

Madeleine Miller, The Song of Achilles

Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child

Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Christian Cameron, Tyrant: Funeral Games

Hilary Mantel, Beyond Black

Philip Pullman, La Belle Sauvage

John le Carré, A Legacy of Spies

James Dashner, The Scorch Trials

Ian Worthington, Demosthenes of Athens and the Fall of Classical Greece

Jason Matthews, Red Sparrow

Jacques Poulin, Le Vieux Chagrin

Ta-Nahesi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power

John McPhee, Draft No. 4

A Decade in Books: 2016

Posted on by Charles-Adam Foster-Simard

In 2016 I was knee deep — about 60,000 words in at the beginning of the year – in writing a novel about the successors of Alexander’s the Great. While I still read and consulted reference books, I also pivoted to reading more fiction that could help me figure out how I could turn hard history (full of holes as it is) into compelling fiction. I turned to an old favourite, David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which I reread to get a feel for Mitchell’s expert handling of a close, third-person narration in the present-tense. I also read fiction that was set in or near the period I was writing about: Harry Turtledove’s Over the Wine Dark Sea, about some swashbuckling Greek sailors (terrible writing); Annabel Lyon’s beautifully moving The Sweet Girl, the sequel of sorts to her amazing The Golden Mean, which was about the relationship between Aristotle and a young Alexander; and Mary Renault, who of course is the queen or grandmother of historical fiction set in Ancient Greece, and whose book about Alexander’s childhood, beautifully titled Fire From Heaven, did not disappoint — although it is a little bit old-fashioned in comparison to Lyon and Mitchell.

I’d been a fan of Diana Athill ever since I read her memoir Yesterday in college, and worked my way through her other books over the years. Alive, Alive Oh! was a collection of essays and would be her last book. I reviewed it for The Millions and completed it by reading Instead of a Book, which is a collection of Athill’s letters to the American poet Edward Field.

In the first half of 2016 I was still commuting to work by train and bus, which is how I got the time to finish Emmanuel Carrère’s book Le Royaume, a 600+ memoir cum novel cum investigative reporting about early Christians. Believe it or not, this book shook French literary criticism to its foundations when it came out in 2014 — everyone was talking about it. I honestly don’t remember much about the novel now.

Then in the summer of 2016 we drove our car back from Montreal all the way to California, and my commute changed to a scenic, 30-minute drive along interstate 280, which meant I read a lot less and started listening to a lot more podcasts, like This American Life and Longform. That’s how I also came to listen to the audibook of Ta-Nehesi Coates’ All the World and Me, narrated by the author, at the recommendation of a colleague. On weekends, G. and I would drive to Santa Cruz to eat fish tacos, sit on the beach, and write in a coffeeshop we liked. On the way we listened to episodes of the Serial podcast.

Several of the books I read that year were for work, so that I could teach them to my students: The Help, The Lightning Thief, Heart of Darkness, The Pearl, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Macbeth — which, strangely and despite having taken several classes on Shakespeare, I’d never read before. As for the other titles, I can’t say I got a lot out of them, but it was interesting to have an external reason to read these books I would’ve probably never picked up myself, a bit like a book club.

As you can see, I continued on my Ferrante fever after having read the first book in the Neapolitan novels during a vacation in Italy in 2015, continuing with the next two novel in the series that year. I had the chance to read Ian McEwan’s novel Nutshell before it was officially released because I reviewed it for The Millions. The novel was a bit of fun, and I would rank it favourably in McEwan’s oeuvre although it’s by no means among his very best. I started reading McEwan in college, after I saw the movie Atonement with Keira Knightley I became a little bit obsessed with him and worked my through his back catalogue (at this point the only novels of his I haven’t read our some of his early ones: The Cement Garden, The Child in Time and Black Dogs) while buying and ready all of his books as they came out: Solar, Sweet Tooth, The Children Act all appear on previous lists. McEwan continues to be a writer that I like to wrestle with, and whose career I love mapping out as it develops, book by book.

Reading List: 2016

David Mitchell, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, La femme qui fuit

Harry Turtledove, Over the Wine Dark Sea

Jacques Poulin, Mon Cheval pour un royaume

Annabel Lyon, The Sweet Girl

Ursula K. LeGuin, The Dispossessed

Catherine Leroux, Madame Victoria

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Milan Kundera, L’insoutenable légèreté de l’être

Elena Ferrante, The Story of a New Name

Maxime-Olivier Moutier, Journal d’un étudiant en histoire de l’art

Diana Athill, Alive, Alive Oh!

Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge

Mary Renault, Fire from Heaven

Diana Athill, Instead of a Book

William Shakespeare, Macbeth

Emmanuel Carrère, Le Royaume

Martin McDonagh, The Leenane Trilogy

Comarc McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

Kent Haruf, Our Souls at Night

Geoff Dyer, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (audio)

Ian McEwan, Nutshell

Albert Sanchez Piñol, Victus

Barry Meier, Missing Man

Kathryn Stockett, The Help

Madeline Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing

Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Nancy Huston, L’Espèce fabulatrice

Ronald Wright, What is America?

Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

Elizabeth Carney, King and Court in Ancient Macedonia

Rick Riordan, The Lightning Thief

Laurence Cossé, La Grande Arche

John Steinbeck, The Pearl

Elena Ferrante, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay

A Decade in Books: 2015

Posted on by Charles-Adam Foster-Simard

G. gave me a wonderful gift in 2011, which came from one of my favourite bookstores, Mr. B’s Emporium of Reading Delights in Bath, England. I was treated to a “bibliotherapy session” in which I sat down with one of the booksellers and told her about my tastes and interests. She then sent me one specially packaged book every month for a year, with a personalized note. I’m ashamed to say that it took me much longer than 12 months to actually get around to reading the twelve books I received that year, and I think Kanoko Okamoto’s A Riot of Goldfish was the last one I finally picked up, the first book I read in 2015. I’m even more ashamed to admit that I don’t remember anything about it…

In 2015 I was living in Palo Alto, California, and commuting every day on the CalTrain to a private school where I taught English, French, and History. I read a lot in the train and in the bus on the way to and from work, in intense 20 minute sessions. And I got up very early to write a novel I started that year about the successor’s of Alexander the Great. A lot of the books I read were research for my novel: primers on the Hellenistic age, biographies of Alexander’s councillors and successors.

Other than these “research” reads, there are some standout books from that year that I recall very well, two in particular. The first is LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. I can’t remember why I picked this novel up, I think it’s just the kind of book you hear about and mean to read. I fell very hard for that book. I remember reading it, gripped by the story, the characters, the voice, and that wondrous world while walking back home from the train station one day. I was focused on the book and all of a sudden I got struck on the head by a passing bird. I was quite stunned, I looked around a bit, but then I went right back to walking and reading.

The other standout from that year is Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, which I started reading while on a two-week holiday near Naples. I had come to join G. who was working on an archaeological dig in Italy that summer. During the day G. was on-site so I went off, either taking the train into the city to walk the dank alleyways and visit museums, or else driving the rented Fiat 500 (nicknamed “Spritz”) around to surrounding villages and interesting historical sites. I had a nice time and it was great to visit alongside reading Ferrante, who depicts the city in such stark terms.

Living in the US, getting books from the university library or buying them from excellent local second-hand sales, I caught up on a lot of American literature I’d failed to get around to before. More Didion, whom I grew very fond of, and also some Updike, Roth, Robinson, Chabon… The Greats. After reading LeGuin I thought I’d open up to more sci-fi and picked up Kim Stanley Robinson’s latest Aurora, about multi-generational space travel in search of a new planet to inhabit. It was a good read, with a superb premise and a really interesting storytelling aspect.

There are several books I read because of my job as a teacher: some were suggested by my students, others felt required by the situation or the class I was teaching. That’s how I got around to Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (in college I had actually acted in one of his other plays), A Streetcar Named Desire, and why I reread things like The Old Man and the Sea and 1984, which are curriculum standards.

I continued to read to G. at night before bed, and in 2015 we undertook our most ambitious project to-date: Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, which I had already read in college and remembered fondly. If memory serves we both had a lot of fun with it, and it’s the sort of book that lends itself well to being read out loud with all the repetitions, vivid descriptions, and hilarious dialogue. Although I think it took us something like 8 months to finish it, so it really felt like we’d finished a reading marathon by the end…

Reading List: 2015

Kanoko Okamoto, A Riot of Goldfish

Guy Delisle, Pyong Yang

Lydie Salvayre, Pas Pleurer

Paul Kingsnorth, The Wake

Edward Albee, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Peter Green, Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic Age

Joan Didion, Where I Was From

Michel Houellebecq, Soumission

Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending

Cesar Aira, The Seamstress and the Wind

Steven Galloway, The Cellist of Sarajevo

James Romm, Ghost on the Throne

Marguerite Duras, L’amant

Charles Baxter, Burning Down the House

Joan Didion, Play It as It Lays

Edward M. Anson, Eumenes of Cardia

Tennesse Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire

Javier Marías, Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell

Jacques Poulin, Un Jukebox dans la tête

Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Philip Roth, American Pastoral

Jane Hornblower, Hieronymus of Cardia

Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

Henri Carrière, Papillon

Paul Cartledge, The Hunt for a New Past: Alexander the Great

Ursula K. LeGuin, The Left Hand of Darkness

Waldemar Heckel, The Last Days and Testament of Alexander the Great

Zadie Smith, On Beauty

Ian Worthington, Alexander the Great: Man and God

Chigozie Obioma, The Fishermen

Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend

Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See

Joseph Roisman, Alexander’s Veterans

Rudyard Kipling, Kim

John McGahern, Amongst Women

Kim Stanley Robinson, Aurora

George Orwell, 1984

Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve

Anakana Schofield, Martin John

John Updike, Rabbit Redux

Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

David Mitchell, Slade House

Diana Athill, After a Funeral

Banana Yoshimoto, Kitchen

Rupert Thomson, Secrecy

Ian McEwan, The Children Act

Michel Rabagliati, Paul à Québec

A Decade in Books: 2014

Posted on by Charles-Adam Foster-Simard

2014 was a year of big change: I finished my thesis and graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing, G. and I got married that summer, and in September we moved to the San Francisco Bay Area where she was beginning a PhD. I remember a lot of my reading from that year vividly, the books locked into a specific time, place, and feeling.

Chris Hadfield’s memoir about being an astronaut is the first book I read in 2014 and I loved it so much that it reminded me how much I used to love space as a kid, and that I wanted to be an astronaut myself for a little while. I wrote an essay about it for The Puritan and read Andy Weir’s The Martian because it was a bestseller and I knew it was being made into a movie.

G. and I spent part of the summer in Germany where she was taking a German language course in Dresden. I read David Mitchell’s Number9Dream in the plane on the way to Germany, rapt, and I read poor Stendhal in Dresden, flopped in the grassy banks of the river Elbe during an early summer heat wave. On weekends we travelled around a bit to places like Berlin and Prague. I had just read Laurent Binet’s HHhH, which is an excellent French book about Operation Anthropoid, an assassination attempt on top Nazi commander Heidrich — “the Butcher of Prague.” In fact we were in Prague just around the anniversary of the events, and G. and I were quite moved when we happened to walk past the church where the agents had hidden and been killed.

Having spent time in Dresden, which was almost entirely destroyed by allied bombing during the war and later rebuilt as a kind of fake version of the city’s pre-war architecture, I wanted to write an essay about reconstruction after war, and read Slaughterhouse Five, whose climax is the author’s real memories of hiding out in a slaughterhouse as a war prisoner when allied bombs decimate the city.

What surprises me is how many books I read in 2014 — 50, which is almost one a week, an excellent average for me. Of course I wasn’t working in the spring, and then I worked a bit during the summer but continued to have a more patchy work situation in the fall until I found a job as a teacher in a private school in the Bay Area at the very end of the year. And so I ate up long, heavy books like The Red and the Black and Bleak House and, when fall came around, I went to the university library and read lots of things I’d been meaning to get to for a long time: The English Patient, Joan Didion, Zadie Smith… These are all wonderful books, wonderful writers. Yes, 2014 was a year of catching up: I finally got around to reading American Gods, The Secret History, Nicholson Baker, Marilynne Robinson, Enduring Love (I’d long been keen on McEwan and was working my way through his back catalogue). I loved them all. This must surely have been one of the best reading streaks of my life.

A few misfires? It seems that everyone was reading The Flamethrowers when it came out; I read it quickly and easily but I remember being a bit bored by it, but then also finding the pan review in The New York Review of Books to be rather unfair. Similarly with The Corrections, a book I had heard so much about (although I read it long after even Freedom had come out). I didn’t find it boring, but can I say that it really brought me anything? No, although I remember the ridiculous scene when one of the characters stuffs a piece of salmon into his pants in an upscale food store and it begins sliding down against his leg. I remember the scene but I can’t say I found it all that funny.

And then there are the books that I continued reading to G. before bed every night — a tradition we had begun with Tim Parks’ wonderful Italian Neighbours. We were somewhat disappointed by his follow-up An Italian Education, but Gopnik’s classic Paris to the Moon was a pleasant book in the same vein (we had no idea we would eventually end up living in Paris about 4 years later). Washington Square was another book we read together before bed, and that one was also underwhelming — but it was also short, thankfully.

A few words on Gloria. Keith Maillard was my thesis advisor at UBC and although I haven’t read all of his books I would hazard to say that this is his masterpiece. I’m ashamed that I actually hadn’t read it before or at least during my time as his student. It’s a wondrous book, the kind of perfect, lengthy novel you can dive into, feel the tingling thrill as it submerges you under its surface. The narration is smooth, masterful: from the first few lines — “It was well past the time when anyone should feel the least bit embarrassed by asking for another drink” — you know you’re in the hands of a master. The novel takes place over the course of a single, long summer in the life of a young woman in the 1950s, who’s hesitating between going to grad school or entering married life, with flashbacks woven in to different periods of her earlier life. There’s sex, violence, love, discussions of literature, beautiful writing. I usually dislike when books use the main character’s name as a title but I can’t see what else this book could possibly be called, because once you’ve met and spent time with Gloria — beautiful, smart, deep, capable, brave; but also proud, troubled, insecure, unsure — she seems so real, like a friend everyone’s heard about, the woman in the room no one can ignore. AND THE THINGS MAILLARD PUTS HER THROUGH. He makes you love her, and then he breaks your heart by having her go through these excruciating coming-of-age trials. But of course she triumphs in the end, and she picks the right choice. It’s an extraordinary novel.

Reading List: 2014

Chris Hadfield, An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth

Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics

Michel Folco, Dieu et nous seuls pouvons

Kevin Barry, There Are Little Kingdoms

Louise Fournier, FLQ: Histoire d’un mouvement clandestin

Andy Weir, The Martian

Jean-Christophe Ruffin, Immortelle randonnée

Alice Munro, The Moons of Jupiter

William S. Messier, Dixie

Zadie Smith, NW

Nick Hornby, Ten Years in the Tub

Dante, Inferno (translated by Mary Jo Bang)

Donna Tartt, The Secret History

Paul-Éric Blanrue, Les malveillants

Robin Jenkins, The Cone-Gatherers

Alan Bennett, A Life Like Other People’s

Laurent Binet, HHhH

Neil Gaiman, American Gods

David Mitchell, number9dream

Stendhal, Le rouge et le noir

Charles Dickens, Bleak House

Nicholson Baker, The Anthologist

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five

Ian McEwan, Enduring Love

Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane (audio)

Rick Gekoski, Outside of a Dog

Michael Ondaatje, The English Patient

Ben Macintyre, A Spy Among Friends

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

David Mitchell, The Bone Clocks

Joan Didion, After Henry

James Salter, Last Night

Adam Gopnik, Paris to the Moon

Frederick Taylor, Dresden: Tuesday 13 February 1945

Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September

Michael Ondaatje, Coming Through Slaughter

Al Alvarez, Where Did It all Go Right?

Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

Zadie Smith, Changing my Mind

Javier Marías, Your Face Tomorrow 2: Dance and Dream

Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage

Tim Parks, An Italian Education

Keith Maillard, Gloria

Christopher Reid, Nonsense

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

Henry James, Washington Square

Richard Flanagan, The Narrow Road to the Deep North

Pierre Lemaitre, Rosy & John

Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

A Decade in Books: 2013

Posted on by Charles-Adam Foster-Simard

I’m continuing my series of posts going through the books I read over the last decade, this time with 2013.

For the record, I would like to point out that I was reading Alice Munro’s last book Dear Life at the very beginning of 2013, months before she won the Nobel Prize for Literature later that year. And what a well deserved win that was, proof that there is after all some justice in the world. I only point the timing because of course once she’d won the prize I saw people reading her books everywhere around me, I couldn’t help that snarky, readerly self-importance: I liked her before the Nobel!

2013 was a year that I remember for its writing more than I do for its reading. I was living in Vancouver, doing an MFA in Creative Writing. I had started working on my thesis at the end of 2012, a novel about three brothers caught up in a terrorist organization fighting for the independence of Québec, and so most of 2013 was spent drafting that manuscript. The previous year I had discovered Hubert Aquin, the post-modern Québecois writer who committed suicide in 1977, not too far from where I went to college in Montreal. I wanted to model my novel on his work, and read another one of his books that summer. I remember feeling energized by his writing, discovering that a Québecois writer was trying to emulate great, global writers like Nabokov felt very exciting. That’s why I also read Gordon Shepard’s excellent HA!: A Self-Murder Mystery, which is a long book, written in English, that explores Hubert Aquin’s suicide. It’s the sort of book that shouldn’t exist, really, because it’s so niche (who reads Aquin? Who reads Aquin in English? Who reads a book about Aquin in English?). But it’s profoundly moving and extremely interesting, and so I’m glad that someone was willing to write it, and someone else was willing to publish it!

G. was finishing up her master’s degree at Oxford in the spring so I went to visit her for a few weeks. I had seen an exhibit on Art Spiegelman at a museum in Vancouver and wanted to write about it for the literary website The Millions. I remember writing an essay about Maus in a coffee place that was set up above a bike shop in Oxford. The coffee was delicious, it felt nice to have all this time in front of me to read and think about books. I’m fairly sure it was my mother who gave me Richard Powers’ The Time of Our Singing, a somewhat laborious but breathtaking book about music and race in America. Since then Powers has won the Pulitzer for a novel about trees, but my second memory from my weeks in Oxford is reading The Time of Our Singing on a park bench while G. was working on a paper in the library. An old lady sat next to me and, thinking that I was studying and wanting to encourage me, gave me half of her KitKat bar. She said I reminder her of her son.

I love Al Alvarez although I don’t think ever wrote anything better than The Writer’s Voice. He really represents another generation, he was a 20th century man of letters who ended up in the 21st century as by accident.  During that same trip in England I visited (discovered?) my favourite book store, The London Review Bookshop in Bloomsbury. I can’t remember what else I bought but I know I spotted a new Al Alvarez in the window: Pondlife. It’s a very moving diary, focused around the swimming ponds on Hampstead Heath where he went to swim whenever he got the chance, and whatever the season. It’s also a book about aging, and about giving things up.

I originally wrote that last paragraph in the present tense but I recently learned that Alvarez passed away in 2019. He was 90, so I’d been expecting the news, but still. What a shocker. He was a brilliant and somewhat undervalued writer. The Writer’s Voice should be required reading for creative writing programs.

What else? I finally got around to reading Nabokov’s Pale Fire and loved it. Funny to see James Salter on my list, as I was just re-reading A Sport and a Pastime this summer — working as I was on my own “France” novel, with some sex in it. Back in 2013 I read Salter for just that reason, because I’d heard somewhere that he was great at writing sex scenes, which of course he is. His style is a little tight for my taste but he has some beautiful, precise prose in that book, and it’s so atmospheric.

Malarky is the debut novel of Irish-Canadian author Anakana Schofield, whom I interviewed in the summer of 2013 for the website of PRISM international magazine. That was one of the interesting aspects of being in a writing program: meeting writers for the first time, having long conversation about craft and books. It made the whole experience of writing feel more legitimate, in a way. Although the author told me Malarky was quite tame, all things considered, I think with its looping style and strongly voiced prose it’s safe to say that this book is experimental, and it makes me realize how much I was going for “difficult” reads, or at least books that pushed the boundaries of fiction with writers like Aquin, Nabokov, Anne Carson, Réjean Ducharme… Even Elizabeth Bowen, whose books I usually adore but whose WWII-novel The Heat of the Day I found dense. It left me, well, rather cold.

At the other end of the spectrum, perhaps, is a novel that purported to be experimental in its structure since the plotting and characters were based on astrology, although in fact it was more traditional, Dickensian in its voice, pacing, and plot. I ended the year with The Luminaries, which came out that summer and won the Booker Prize that fall (and was recently made into a BBC mini series). There’s always a certain pleasure to reading a book just as it comes out, to dive right into the hype alongside everyone else. I remember the book somewhat well; I remember the voice, and some of the scenes flash in my memory. As I recall, Catton uses the adjective “fat” a few too many times in the opening chapters, and I remember that for all it’s careful plotting and multiplying characters I was a bit disappointed at the end of the book, as the chapters became shorter and shorter — waning as they are meant to — we are left with a trite flashback about rain falling, and love.

Reading List: 2013

Alice Munro, Dear Life

Joël Dicker, La vérité sur l’affaire Harry Québert

ZZ Packer, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere

Lucien Bouchard, Lettres à un jeune politicien

David Malouf, An Imaginary Life

Seamus Heaney, Seeing Things

Gordon Shepard, HA!: A Self-Murder Mystery

Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

Gabriel Josipovici, Whatever Happened to Modernism?

Noel Streatfield, Sapplings

Denys Arcand, Euchariste Moisan

David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Art Spiegelman, Maus

Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing

Elizabeth Bowen, The Heat of the Day

Anakana Schofield, Malarky

Al Alvarez, Pondlife

Cesar Aira, The Literary Conference

Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire

Mordecai Richler, Barney’s Version

John le Carré, Smiley’s People

Hubert Aquin, Trou de mémoire

Alan Moore, V for Vendetta

Alice Oswald, Memorial

James Salter, A Sport and a Pastime

Ben Downing, Queen Bee of Tuscany

César Aira, Varamo

Keith Maillard, Running

Réjean Ducharme, L’Avalée des avalées

Adam Gopnik, Winter

Wajdi Mouawad, Forêts

Louis Hamelin, La Constellation du Lynx

Joseph Boyden, The Orenda

Eleanor Catton, Luminaries

Francis Spufford (ed.), The Antarctic

Samuel Beckett, Boulevard Saint Jacques, 1985

Posted on by Charles-Adam Foster-Simard

I can’t remember having any other background image on my computer’s desktop than a picture of the Irish author Samuel Beckett. The picture was taken by the Irish photographer John Minihan in 1985, in Paris. The photograph, in black and white, shows a grizzled, wrinkled Beckett sitting at a table of the terrasse of a café. On the table in front of him are two cups of coffee, and an ashtray towards which Beckett is reaching to stub out a cigarette. The location is evident from the writing on the windows of the café behind him: croissants, glace. The light–coming off diffuse from tthe left, combined with the reflection of the round café lights in the window and on the ceiling–is exquisite. Beckett, despite the intricacies of his wrinkled face, that remarkable hawk-like nose, the streak of dark hair swirling off his forehead, looks a little worse for wear in his thin coat and mottled scarf, but that’s all part of the charm.

john-minihan-samuel-beckett-seated-in-cafe,-paris

The picture is somewhat famous, sometimes recognized as one of the most remarkable photographs of the 20th century. It’s certainly definitive of a time and place, and of Paris as a home for expatriate artists. There’s a compelling account of how Minihan took the picture on his website: how he approached Beckett in advance of the writer’s 80th birthday, and most importantly how Beckett controlled the session, choosing the time and place, late on a Sunday afternoon in December, the light fading fast and Minihan finally managing to snap the shot while Beckett “orchestrated” the picture, changing his demeanour and turning his gaze away from the camera. “They turned out better than I expected because Sam directed the whole scene,” Minihan wrote in The Guardian in 2012.

The truth is that I’ve never read anything by Samuel Beckett–not even Waiting for Godot. The reason why I’ve liked to look at that picture for the last 10+ years is the expression on Beckett’s face, which is hard to describe: worn, focused, distant. The two coffee cups reveals the presence of the photographer, but it creates a certain false intimacy with the viewer–she could be the one with him, sitting at that table, being ignored while Beckett sighs, lost in his own thoughts.

For me that picture represents an idealization of the artist’s mindset. There’s something captivating about the intensity and melancholy of that focused gaze. This is the picture of an artist who takes their work seriously, who gets up early to write, who spends the time in hard chairs, who, shy of his 80th birthday, 16 years after having been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, warms his throat with an ancient scarf. He looks worn down by his own ideas. Looking at that picture makes me want to get to work.

Even now that I know that Becket was posing, I don’t find the image false. Beckett knew exactly what he was doing, enacting a form of control over the art; but that, after all, is the writer’s credo, to be in absolute control of the craft. To reach the ring of truth, a writer has to toil and whittle and pose, and then hide all the work.

JohnMinihan_SamuelBeckett_BoulevardStJacques_Paris_1985_4

A Decade in Books: 2012

Posted on by Charles-Adam Foster-Simard

I’m continuing my series of posts going through the books I read over the last decade.

2012 was an important transition year: the last semester of my undergraduate degree, a summer of work in Montréal, then in September the first semester of my MFA in Vancouver.

I’ll pass quickly on the first books in the list, which were mostly read or re-read for school: I remember a class on Elizabethan playwriting, another on 20th century American fiction.

It’s that summer, between working two jobs as a waiter and an administrative assistant in a local homeless shelter, shuttling back and forth between these two places of work, my parent’s house where I lived, and my girlfriend’s house, that I managed to find time to read some excellent books that have stayed with me since.

I’d long meant to read Annabel Lyon’s book about Alexander the Great’s relationship with Aristotle and loved it–I also read it because Lyon taught at the program I would be attending in September. Patrick DeWitt’s The Sister’s Brothers was all the rage around that time and I liked it well enough. John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead blew me away; it’s hard to believe he hasn’t published a book since. The first David Mitchell I’d read was Jacob de Zoet, so of course Cloud Atlas broke me brain: the storytelling! The structure! The voices! And what could I say about Hubert Aquin’s masterful, confounding Prochain épisode? It’s the kind of book you obsess over for life. I remember thinking Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies was even better than Wolf Hall, and another vivid memory from that year is from a few months later, when I texting G. during my lunch break at work as Hilary Mantel was winning the Booker Prize for the second time in a row.

It really was a summer of beautiful reads.

The Brothers Karamazov is a book I had first attempted to read a few years earlier, during a backpacking trip in the Balkans. I’d never finished it and felt guilty, so I brought it along with me to Vancouver and it’s the first book I finished there. I honestly can’t say I got much out of it except for the satisfaction of adding it to my list of books read.

Vancouver was rainy days, early nights, reading on the bus to get to school or work. Also buying fewer books and borrowing more of them from the library. I remember feeling like my entire life happened in texts: I got up and wrote, then I read the stories and essays written by my peers, then I went to school and talked about these stories in workshops, then I read submissions for the program’s literary magazine, then I went to work as a copywriter.

I found both the time and the interest to read for pleasure. I wanted to be a writer; reading good novels was part of my training. I remember being enthralled by Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart, devouring it in bed. But now I can’t even remember the plot. Some of these reads were also part of my literary apprenticeship. I reviewed Sweet Tooth, the newest Ian McEwan, for the literary website The Millions, while I read Carnival in preparation to meet it’s author, Rawi Hage, for an interview during the Vancouver Writers’ Festival.

When I think of 2012 I think of a reader trying to turn himself in a writer.

A few words on the last book on the list: Tim Parks’ hilarious and charming memoir of life and family in Northern Italy, Italian Neighbours. I’ve long appreciated Parks’ reviews in the New York Review of Books. I can’t remember where I picked up this book but I was finding it so funny that I kept reading bits of it to G. over the Christmas holidays. She enjoyed having me read to her so much that I ended up reading some of the book to her every night before going to bed. It was the start of a long tradition that continues to this day.

Reading List: 2012

Jocelyne Saucier, Il pleuvait des oiseaux

Frank O’Connor, The Lonely Voice

Willa Cather, A Lost Lady

Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker’s Holiday

Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Sophocles, Oedipus the King

Longinus, On Great Writing

Sean O’Faolain, Stories

Edith Wharton, The Custom of the Country

John Fletcher, The Woman’s Prize

Thomas Middleton, The Revenger’s Tragedy

Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust

Brian Friel, Translations

Toni Morrison, Jazz

Don DeLillo, Libra

Annabel Lyon, The Golden Mean

Ian McEwan, The Comfort of Strangers

Margaret Atwood, Negotiating with the Dead

Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers

Jacques Poulin, L’homme de la Saskatchewan

Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

Juan Pablo Villalobos, Down the Rabbit Hole

Guy Delisle, Chroniques de Jérusalem

Antonio Tabucchi, Pereira Maintains

Diana Athill, Midsummer Night in the Workhouse

John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead

Dany Laferrière, Pays sans chapeau

David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas

Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island

Hubert Aquin, Prochain episode

Mavis Gallant, Varieties of Exile (The Montreal Stories)

Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Rawi Hage, Carnival

Ed. Graeme Harper and Jeri Kroll, Creative Writing Studies

Sherry Simon, Translating Montreal

Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart

Ian McEwan, Sweet Tooth

Junot Diaz, This Is How You Lose Her

Elizabeth Bachinsky, I Don’t Feel So Good

David Mitchell, Black Swan Green

Object Lessons (Short Stories from The Paris Review)

Eric Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front

Philip Roth, Everyman

Tim Parks, Italian Neighbours