Previous installments of This Week in Reading can be found here.
Greetings again from rural Canada! This will be the last rural Canadian reading post until…mid-September. So you can expect that next week’s installment will be exclusively books set in NYC about literary men experiencing agita with their literary dads. Maybe they’ll have terse dinners! HAHAHAHAHAHA, I am not even joking, because my next book is David Gilbert’s And Sons. But it’s supposed to be really good. If you want to write a really good novel about NYC literary men and their dads, I’ll totally read it.
But, for now, we are still in rural Canada, and I thought we’d do some ghostly stuff and some SUPER AMAZING microhistory and one total nostalgia-fest.
Did I mention my mom’s house is a little haunted? It is. I both believe and do not believe in ghosts, like many people, so I say this 60% ironically. Mostly, my deceased grandmother has been spotted a few times, and my great-great-grandfather Pat is really up in our business. By which I mean that he came home drunk from the Marysville Hotel in 1926 and got hit by a train, which is the ultimate fate of every dog our family has ever had, as the Trans-Canada railroad cuts across our lane (PICTURED, with Child of The Toast.)
Anyway, they dragged him up to the house to die, and now visitors occasionally ask if someone left a radio playing, because they could SWEAR someone was whistling “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” as they were falling asleep. Great-great-grandfather Pat is a bit of a card. But it’s all very benign and pleasant. My cousins and I like to rank the haunted-ness of the farmhouse, a la “the most haunted room is the one with two beds, the second most haunted room is to the left when you go upstairs, the third most haunted room is across from that one, and the least haunted room is the little one above the kitchen.” Now, my cousins insist that the aforementioned little room is the MOST haunted room, but since that one is my room, I disagree. Perhaps I am actually a ghost?
All of this is to say that I like to read books about ghosts when I’m here. This time, I wound up flipping through You Are Never Alone: Our Life on the Donnelly Homestead, which, as you will know if you have read my blogging for any amount of time, is about my favourite thing, the Black Donnellys. This is not even remotely the best book about the Black Donnellys, who are the only interesting thing to happen in Canadian history (prove me wrong with more interesting history, Canada), but the guy living on the homestead has a great sense of humour. For example, people are always showing up at his house, right, and asking him if it’s true a horse won’t go past the homestead after dark, and he’s all “this is 2013, how many people are riding down the road on horseback after nightfall period?” It’s fun. But you should buy literally every book about the Black Donnellys and then develop weird crushes on long-dead Irish-Canadian murderers and thieves. I mean, check out Tom, right? Rowr! Don’t get too excited, he was brutally killed by a local vigilante mob who got tired of putting up with his shit.
I am not here to talk chiefly about the Black Donnellys today (close tab), but rather to praise Cassie Brown’s shamefully under-read work of non-fiction, Death on the Ice: The Great Newfoundland Sealing Disaster of 1914. You can buy it used for a penny plus shipping, or you can get it for the Kindle, and I really, really think you should. I hate to play this card, I really do, but if said disaster had occurred in the United States, and someone had exhaustively researched it and made it come completely alive in the hearts and minds and extremities of readers, it would be practically the Into Thin Air of sealing disasters. It’s compelling, it’s well-written, the story is tragic and full of class frustration and grinding privation and the human spirit and all that good stuff, and, you know, these are people whose story should be told. You can’t imagine how bad it was to be a sealer in Newfoundland in 1914. They were all just off-season fishermen, and they would make an average of $28 bucks for the winter, just clubbing baby seals and trying not to think about it while they gradually acquired seven extra pounds of dried blood on their clothes and lost digits and hoped to return home to feed their families. And then, historical spoiler, through a colossal series of administrative failures, a whole bunch of them got left out on a literal ice floe for two days and nights and mostly froze to death. No, they did not receive compensation. It’s a great world.
One always hesitates to say “hey, go read this lurid tragic tale,” because it’s got an exploitative whiff to it, but in this case, because so few people know anything about this horrible thing, it should be regarded in the same vein of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire: a moment in the social history of labor in North America. However, the factory fire was a watershed event for working conditions, and this one didn’t change shit, so, there’s that.
My other read this week, I hesitate to mention. I got into bed and found my childhood copy of Jane of Lantern Hill, which, next to the Emily books and The Blue Castle, was always my favourite Lucy Maud Montgomery novel. On re-read, which took maybe an hour, because it is, you know, a book for children, I had that total You Can’t Go Home Again experience of being unable to re-immerse oneself into a place that was once yours, which was a bit of a bummer, but if the worst thing that happened to you this week was “failed to enjoy a novel for children as an adult,” seriously, buy a lottery ticket, right? Just once, just ONCE, though, it would be nice if Lucy Maud Montgomery had been allowed or wanted to write a book about kids with separated parents who just learned to deal with the fact that their parents no longer loved each other, as opposed to “oh, I never got your letter straightening out our tragic misunderstanding! I know it’s been ten years, but I’m totally going to leave my exciting Toronto social life and my great clothes and come back to PEI to, you know, boil clams for you or whatever.” I actually make a conscious effort not to do a lot of nostalgia-book stuff in this space, because we have Jaya on that beat, and there are so many fine books for adults, but you should also know that you are not the only person who attempts to jam their consciousness into their childhood reads in an attempt to ignore the clawed embrace of death which waits for us all.
See you next week.
Photo credit: Donnellys.com (go, spend hours)
Works Referenced:
Cassie Brown, Death on the Ice: The Great Newfoundland Sealing Disaster of 1914 (Academic | Amazon)
David Gilbert, And Sons (Indiebound | Amazon)
Lucy Maud Montgomery, Jane of Lantern Hill (Indiebound | Amazon)
J. Robert Salts, You Are Never Alone: Our Life on the Donnelly Homestead (Amazon)
Tags: death on the ice, horrible stories, lucy maud montgomery, nicole’s mom says we don’t know he was drunk but he was definitely walking home from a bar, reading with nicole, the black donnellys, this week in reading
Every Grade 9 student in Newfoundland reads Death on the Ice. I don’t know a single person who actually enjoyed it, but everyone is awful in Grade 9 and very few people will admit to liking any of the books we have to read for class, so that probably doesn’t mean anything. I suspect I would like it a lot better now, as a more aware adult who worked as a Coast Guard radio operator through several sealing seasons.
I have heard that this is the case, and I am amazed that everyone in Newfoundland does not require extensive therapy as a result.
We probably do.
I like to read books about ghosts when I’m here. Oh man I would absolutely being doing the exact opposite and reading all the books about sunshine and light and happy things.
GHOSTS, NICOLE. GHOSTS. They’re up there with bees and macbook centipedes. No thank you.
I’ve actually spent part of today reading the plot of The Conjuring, and then reading about the alleged real life story that it’s based on, and then tried to immerse myself into a ghost/haunting related wiki-wormhole.
I don’t know why I do this to myself.
You’re not the only one.
I’ve never read Death on the Ice, but I’m definitely going to! On the same subject, Kent Stetson’s play The Harps of God is also about this sealing disaster, and is pretty great. Very poetic.
Ok so this week I finally read Cat’s Eye. Oh my god, you guys. Margaret Atwood knows, you guys. Margaret Atwood knows about everything. I mean, I’ve read The Handmaid’s Tale, went through a massive Atwood phase in Grade 9, she is clearly A Canadian Treasure but this book cements that she is a GODDAMNED GENIUS FOR OUR TIME.
Also the narrator had a number of snarky comments about Toronto, which I appreciated.
You are correct. It is her finest novel.
The blurb on the back cover has always made me go “….ehhh,” put it back on the shelf, and buy a different Attwood.
Yeah, same here. Guess I should give it another go!
Cat’s Eye made me cry on public transit. Multiple times.
Can I just say that I was really enjoying The Blue Castle until towards the end where it turned into ridiculous bullshit? And I thought I was fairly tolerant of L.M. Montgomery’s particular brand of ridiculous bullshit.
But COME ON. REALLY.
Do you mean how it turned out that her fatal illness was an OOOPS! misunderstanding? Or how the man who agreed to marry her on the condition she was dying turned out to also be the author whose work kept her going all those years? Or how he also turned out to be super-rich and the son of the patent medicine guy everyone in the novel kept recommending to her for her ailments? Please be more specific.
One secret identity I can deal with. 2 secret identities, in addition to the ‘OOOPS YOU’RE NOT REALLY DYING’, was just a leeeetle over-the-top.
But really it was the “oh, I’m not really dying, that means I must leave you because I don’t think you love me, no, no stop telling me you love me I know it’s a lie no, don’t, stop, I need to go back to my sad spinster life because you are rich and you love me -”
And then my brain exploded.
Here’s the Dick-in-a-Box version of writing an LM Montgomery novel:
Step One: Make your protagonist think she is unworthy of love.
Step Two: Have a man demonstrate he thinks she is worthy of love.
Step Three: Make her open the box.
And that’s the way you do it.
There should be a word(!) for the sort of novel/play/movie where you are barely suspending disbelief / potentially enjoying it, and maybe have an email in draft form ready to go (or facebook post) to some friends about how said author/playwright/filmmaker might be underrated, and then all of sudden HELL NO, and you kind of throw your hands up.
It’s pretty over the top. But the thing that hung me up a recent reread is that I cannot tell whether or not we are supposed to think that they are having sex. I could go any of three ways: we’re supposed to think they are, we’re supposed to think they aren’t, or we’re not supposed to think about it. But I can’t settle on one.
Really? I thought they were totally-definitely having sex. In fact, it’s the only Montgomery book I can think of where I was certain that sex was happening (Anne and Gilbert’s kids were totally birthed from starlight on meadows or some shit).
But there is so much emphasis on her supposed illness – she can’t be subjected to any “shocks of joy, ” and they’d either have to be using birth control (which wasn’t really a thing, right?) or would be risking pregnancy, which couldn’t be good for her fake heart disease, plus she’d either die pregnant or leave him with a baby.
It’s true that the book is explicit about the existence of sex (& its consequences) and about the fact that they are sleeping in the same bed, hence my confusion.
You make a fair point.
Man, I always thought they were boning, but now I don’t know. Regardless, Barney telling Valancy that she has a nice voice for lovemaking is hmmm pretty hot.
There was a lot of BS to swallow at the end of The Blue Castle, but I was just happy Valancy didn’t end up living with her nightmare family again. They were beyond The Worst.
Nicole! You could have brought it all back around if only your childhood LM Montgomery read had been her rad book of ghost stories, Among the Shadows. I lost my old copy so now all I can do is sit around and wonder if that book was as great as I thought, and if the adultery in that one story was explicit or if I was just a quick-to-suss-out-adultering child.
When you say that “Death on the Ice” is the “Into Thin Air” of sealing disasters*, are you trying to tell us that the author is a HUGE ASSHOLE
*Sealing disaster**: a WAY less embarrassing way to die than climbing fucking Everest
**Sealing disaster: probably a thing that happens to plumbers pretty frequently
Krakauer is an asshole? What happened?
But…what IS the best book on the Black Donnellys?
Seconded.
I thought I had looked through the comments to make sure this wasn’t already asked, but apparently I have no eyesight. Good, good.
I think it would be the Black Donnellys, by Thomas Kelley? Nicole included it in one of the “Really Good Books About Real People” lists on the Hairpin last year, and the blurb sounded so good but I haven’t been able to find it anywhere.
I also need to know this, because I got to this part of the Wiki link: “It was later discovered he had been staying in the barn and working the fields while dressed in his wife’s clothing.” And I’m all in.
I love the Child of the Toast’s hat.
SPEAKING of, well, less of ghosts than Scary Houses, but anyway, I FINALLY read The Haunting of Hill House and it was amazing and everything that I was promised and more. So creepy, but also so SO sad.
I’m also trying to get into the recent-ish The Other Typist, which has a great-sounding premise, but is not terribly well written. Really hoping it gets better.
Nicole! By the by, were you always chill about seeing/experiencing paranormal things, even as a kid? I’d like to think I would be cool with it but I think it would freak me out, even if it was benign.
Okay, so then what is the best book about the Black Donnellys? where should I start? Because I’ve been meaning to for quite some time.
William Bell’s Five Days of the Ghost is totally about my hometown. People go swimming around the “haunted island” all the time. Also his daughter taught me 11th grade English.
CREEPY CANADA DEVOTEES WHERE ARE YOU?
I’ve never experienced any ghosty/paranormal stuff, but I would like to!
Toast Ghost Retreat chez Cliffe homestead!!
My sister says she fell asleep on the couch and woke up and her house was a saloon with pretty barmaids, music and gamblers. She swears they were ghosts. Note to self: do not sleep on sister’s couch. Or be prepared, go to sleep dressed for 18th century revelry.
I also need to know this, because I got to this part of the Wiki link: "It was later discovered he had been staying in the barn and working the fields while dressed in his wife's clothing." And I'm all in.
Only tangentially related, but I was recently revisiting my List of Secret Fears and realized that a good 78% of them are the result of reading every Reader’s Digest published in the 1970s because my grandmother never threw anything away and they were all filled with horrific retellings of great disasters. Like that one time a suspended dance floor in, like, St. Louis collapsed and trapped an entire New Year’s party. Or that plane that crashed into an icy river (ocean?) outside Washington, D.C. Or Legionnaire’s disease, which remains in my top five Secret Fears to this day even though I don’t quite know what it is.
Oh, good, it appears that they’re still producing content to stock my List.
Wow. They are trying to keep us terrified.
It reminds me of how I enjoy surfing Wikipedia and finding the list of most bizarre deaths, nightclub fires, and human stampedes. Like, I couldn’t leave the house already. Thanks, Wikipedia.
Only tangentially related, but I was recently revisiting my List of Secret Fears and realized that a good 78% of them are the result of reading every Reader's Digest published in the 1970s because my grandmother never threw anything away and they were all filled with horrific retellings of great disasters. Like that one time a suspended dance floor in, like, St. Louis collapsed and trapped an entire New Year's party. Or that plane that crashed into an icy river (ocean?) outside Washington, D.C. Or Legionnaire's disease, which remains in my top five Secret Fears to this day even though I don't quite know what it is.
Oh, good, it appears that they're still producing content to stock my List.
There was a lot of BS to swallow at the end of The Blue Castle, but I was just happy Valancy didn't end up living with her nightmare family again. They were beyond The Worst.
You're not the only one.
Wow. They are trying to keep us terrified.
It reminds me of how I enjoy surfing Wikipedia and finding the list of most bizarre deaths, nightclub fires, and human stampedes. Like, I couldn't leave the house already. Thanks, Wikipedia.