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Tom Jokinen's Night Table Recommendations

Wednesday, Jul 21, 2010 at 2:46pm

I keep fat books on my bedside table for the nights I can't sleep and thin books for the nights I can, when I'm too tired for more than a page or two. In fact I fall asleep easily so the fat books never get read. They exist as pure potential or myths, the Loch Ness monsters of the books I own. I may never read them but it's important to know they're there in case I ever do, but I won't. Meanwhile the thin books never get finished because I can't remember what I read the night before and I end up starting again, every night in the same place, falling asleep after two pages. I should stick to TV. Anyway, here are my poor neglected bedside books:

THE FAT ONES

The Complete Works of Isaac Babel - When I read The Possessed, Elif Batuman's charming and giddy account of her life as a grad student and her crystal-meth-style addiction to Russian literature, I bought the Babel book on the strength of her story about meeting the great writer's daughter at a Babel conference, a woman so grand of character she spoke, to Elif's writerly ear, ENTIRELY IN CAPITAL LETTERS. Not loud, just large. So now I need to read the "Red Cavalry Stories" at least, maybe tonight. But I know I won't.

The Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O'Connor - This one I have to at least dip into. They're letters, not the bloody "Red Cavalry Stories" and I think Flannery O'Connor, the fluent stylist she was, probably wrote amazing grocery lists so the letters I expect to amaze, after all they (apparently) offer revealing flashes of an odd and enigmatic woman, a Catholic writer in the Jesus-haunted Protestant south who once said that southern novelists wrote about grotesque characters because they were still able to recognize them. Remember when people applied craft and flair to their letters, pre LOL? Same as Jessica Mitford whose book of letters, called Decca, I didn't read when I lived in Winnipeg.

THE THIN ONES

Boredom by Patricia Meyer Spacks - A literary history of a post-modern malady, or maybe a source of inspiration. By all accounts (I haven't read it) the author is enthusiastic about boredom and how Jane Austen, Donald Barthelme, Samuel Johnson and William Wordsworth fought like otters to make their own ennui and dull lives interesting to others, which they did. It reminds me of the main character in Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift (not Humboldt himself, but the other one) who saw boredom not as the root of all evil, although it does keep the populace disengaged from discourse, but as a motivator. He planned to write a thesis to that effect but never finished it. I think I'll re-read Humboldt's Gift, although Bellow's Seize the Day is on my bedside table too, one of the thin books.

Three Tales by Gustave Flaubert - Contains the short story "A Simple Heart" which is the best short story ever written, about a pious woman who leads a long and simple life, then loses her sight and before she dies grows certain that the Holy Spirit is embodied in a stuffed dead parrot she keeps on her dresser. It's heartbreaking and delightful and I read it in one delicious swoop without falling asleep.

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Tom Jokinen is a radio producer and video-journalist who has worked on Morningside, Counterspin with Avi Lewis and Definitely Not the Opera as well as many other CBC shows. In 2006 he took a job as an apprentice undertaker at a Winnipeg funeral home. This experience led to his highly acclaimed memoir Curtains: Adventures of an Undertaker in Training which he launched at McNally Robinson Booksellers Winnipeg in March of this year. Tom has also worked as a railroad operator, an editorial cartoonist and spent two years in medical school at the University of Toronto. He dropped out, but not before dissecting two human cadavers.

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