Fall colours

The Indie Rock Coloring Book, reading advice
for Stephen Harper and more cool releases

by JULIET WATERS

It’s been a while since I’ve been back to school. Last week, however, I suffered a rare wave of nostalgia, triggered no doubt by the Montreal launch of The Indie Rock Coloring Book, compiled by Montreal’s non-profit Yellow Bird Project. Somewhere in between giving Wolfmother a festive scarf and completing a maze, which would reunite Broken Social Scene by helping Kevin Drew avoid the ladies and Feist avoid a million dollar solo contract, I felt that ache for the promise of a new year filled with new books and tons of reading assignments.

Then I remembered that’s my job. And this happy thought got even stronger as I thought about what’s shaping up to be an especially great fall book season.

Leading the way is A Gate at the Stairs, the long-awaited book by Lorrie Moore. Generally considered America’s Alice Munro, but funnier, this is Moore’s first book in 11 years. The last one was Birds of America, and people are still talking about “People Like That Are the Only People Here,” the brilliantly painful short story about a baby with cancer. The first paragraph of the book imagines songbirds caught in a killing frost, so my light-hearted back-to-school probably won’t last.

Then again it never did. Still, I’ve got this feeling that the good reading will. Helped, probably, by the almost deafening good buzz surrounding the new Jonathan Lethem novel, Chronic City. I’m a big fan, and so like many, was hugely disappointed with his last book, a glib romance about an aspiring California indie rock group. (Please, everyone, no more novels about rock bands. Try colouring books!) Chronic City returns Lethem to his bohemian Brooklyn roots with a dark urban panoramic cover that is appropriately sombre, even depressing. Yay!

NAKED AND LOVING IT

I’m also looking forward to Nick Hornby’s Juliet, Naked. Just to clear the air, the novel is not about me. Juliet is the name of a famous, but fictional break-up album (amazing, isn’t it, that there isn’t an actual one?). Advance reviews suggest this novel may permanently shift Hornby from lad lit to literature with a capital “L.” And because I so love his book reviews, that’s a good thing.

I won’t be happy for long, however, once I get my hands on Barbara Ehrenreich’s Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. The title pretty much says it all. And it does seem that America could use a little more pessimism, insecurity and doubt, like, for instance, Canada.

We’ll have plenty of that with another election looming. Great time for the release of What Is Stephen Harper Reading? by Booker winning ex-Montrealer Yann Martel. This is a collection of recommended books and letters sent to our Prime Minister over the course of two years. Martel will be in Montreal Nov. 18th to talk about this project, and maybe even the rumoured three million dollar advance he recently received for his next novel.

CAN DO, CANLIT

Still thinking of Ehrenreich’s book, I don’t want to get too positive, but there are other promising books coming out of Canada. Catherine Gildiner follows up her popular book Too Close to the Falls with After the Falls, a ’60s wild child coming-of-age memoir that seems nicely timed to bring some sharp reality to recent Woodstock nostalgia. Michael Crummey follows up his IMPAC Dublin award listed novel The Wreckage with Galore, a family epic set in rural Newfoundland. And Lori Lansens follows up The Girls, her international best seller about twins conjoined at the head, with The Wife’s Tale, a novel about a morbidly obese woman forced by circumstances on an improbable road trip.

Finally, if you can’t find a moment for these, at least Google Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters for the hilarious book trailer on YouTube. This follow up to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies is due for release on the same day as Dan Brown’s The Lost Symbol. Unfortunately no colouring book that I know of.