Talk is cheap. Apparently, so is reading.

Well, it's good to know that someone out there is still making money. And that it isn't even necessarily an evil empire. It might actually be artists. Authors, specifically. Apparently, the publishing industry has proven to be fairly recessive-proof thus far, at least in Canada (and knock on wood). Basically, due to many factors that I don't claim to fully understand, buying books in Canada at the moment is a bargain. If you would like all the technical details as to why that is, you can click here for the article in the Star. My only disclaimer is that I don't particularly recommend their featured author, Wally Lamb. I thought She's Come Undone was pretentious and condescending. Although I Know This Much Is True wasn't a bad read. Basically, his latest, The Hour I First Believed, could go either way, but I won't be picking it up anytime soon.



I'm not sure I will ever understand how it is that some people don't like to read (and celebrity magazines really don't count as reading). And I am certain I will never understand artists who don't like to read--books can provide a whole other world of ideas, characters, inspiration...not to mention how wonderful it is to jump on the bandwagon and pursue something before it becomes a movie. Plus, on occasion, you can find good audition monologue material in books. Frequently it requires tweaking, but it is still technically a published work. I think, as an artist, reading is part of your job. Fortunately, right now, the economy is making that part of your job easier. And if you still can't afford the investment, there is an even more inexpensive option--get a library card. Read books, newspapers, plays, and even, okay, the occasional celebrity mag. It's all character building, artist building material.

And the non-fiction is just as important. I recently finished reading Canadians by Roy MacGregor and thoroughly enjoyed it. He has some great insights into our national character and into what makes us tick. And I was surprised at how much of it I see in myself, given that I spent the latter half of my childhood in the U.S. Apparently the stamp of Canada on my self is indelible. And that is just fine with me. I also enjoyed, as much as one can, I think, General Dallaire's account of his time with UNAMIR during the Rwandan genocide in Shake Hands With the Devil (which has since become a motion picture and even spawned a documentary and movement called Not On Our Watch). This constitutes the general education requirement of being an artist, I think.

As for fiction, I just finished Brave New World by Alduous Huxley, a classic that I, for some reason, was not actually forced to read in high school. But it's definitely relevant to our times and certainly asks questions of the imagination. I also recently read Fall On Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald, a great Canadian author and playwright (Goodnight Desdemona, (Good Morning Juliet)), which I highly recommend to anyone, but especially to the women of the artistic world. I find her writing of women to be extremely interesting. And, if you do like Roy MacGregor, who is a journalist for the Globe and Mail, by the way, his fiction is worth checking out, too--Canoe Lake is his tale of events leading up to Tom Thomson's death in our own Algonquin Park.

Those are just my recent reads. If you would like more suggestions, check out your local bookstore. Or, if you're interested in exploring the landscape of Canadian authors, check out Noah Richler's tome This Is My Country, What's Yours? A Literary Atlas of Canada. It is a bit of a slow read, but entirely worthwhile. Failing that, his website gets right to the goods on the who's who and where they locate, geographically speaking.

Happy recession reading!