In case anyone was wondering what I was trying to describe in my snowblogging yesterday, I went back and took pictures of it. Because a picture is worth a thousand words, and I’d rather take three considered photographs than write three thousand words for you. No offense.

01. Total number of books owned: Somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000. I’m totally crap at estimation, but I did a rough count once. Since then I’ve gotten rid of a ton of books, got a ton more and have put roughly half of my collection in storage. Plus I acquire an average of 2-5 books a week. “A couple thousand” seems about right.

02. The last book(s) I bought: Here’s a few of the newer arrivals.

- Louise Brooks: Lulu Forever - Peter Cowie
- Death Note #8 - Tsugumi Ohba & Takeshi Obata
- This Will All End in Tears - Joe Ollman
- Shelf Life: Fantastic Stories Celebrating Bookstores - edited by Greg Ketter

03. The last book I read: I re-read Zelazny’s Amber Chonicles, Volume I (i.e. Books 1-5) for the umpteenth time. Haven’t done that in the last year and a bit, but it was worth going back again–a familiar ray of sunshine in an otherwise wet and murky season.

04. Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character? Plenty. Pick a medium and genre and I might be able to be more specific.

05. What are you currently reading? Bernard Cornwell’s trilogy about the Viking/Saxon wars in early Britain (The Last Kingdom, The Pale Horseman, Lords of the North). I’d read The Last Kingdom before, but I wanted to wait until all three were out before I kept going. Of course, by that point I’d forgotten what had happened in the first one, so now I’m going through all of them again. (The Last Kingdom’s worth the re-read–I’m picking up tons of stuff I missed the first time around.) I was gonna settle down to plough through Death Note #8 a couple of days ago, but it’s clear from reading the first few pages that too much time has passed since I read the last one (how familiar). I’m probably going to have to start all the way at the beginning again, which I may or may not do in the near future.

06. Six books that mean a lot to me (and why): I’m going to try to keep this short, ’cause when I tried to tackle this one the first time around I was ending up with six short essays. No joke. So I’m gonna do this in under twenty words instead. Brevity is GO!

A Song of Ice and Fire - George R.R. Martin: The best fiction series I’ve ever read. Gripping, historical, nail-biting stories of the deepest realism and highest calibre.
Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson: The novel cyberpunk wanted to be (and a piss-take of the genre) and the story The Matrix should have been.
Cat’s Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut: - You know that novel you find in your teens that completely fucks over the way you see the world? Yeah.
Amber Volume I - Roger Zelazny: - The ultimate blending of fantasy, Machiavellian family relations and philosophy with swashbuckling and science-fiction thrown in for good measure.
Watchmen - Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons: - For years I called it “the best book I’ve ever read”. It’s certainly the best superhero story ever written.
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams: - I attribute most of my sense of humour to two things: Monty Python and H2G2. But I like H2G2 more.

07. Favorite short story authors:

- Harlan Ellison: Ellison was probably the first author I ever really started collecting. I started picking up his books when I was 14 or 15, almost always in used bookstores, almost always for $5 or less. Nearly two decades on, I’ve succeeded in rounding up about 35 of his books or, to put it another way, under half of what he’s published. He is one of the authors who, pretty much every time I sit down with his books, makes me go, “Why the fuck am I writing?! I will never be this good!” Then I redouble my efforts.
- H.P. Lovecraft: The first tattoo I got was a Lovecraftian design. It’s really hard to get much creepier than he managed in stories like “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”. The various masters of horror fiction pay homage to him for good reason.
- T.C. Boyle: Not only is his prose effortless and elegant, he manages to jump from genre to genre and tone to tone completely effortlessly. His novels are well-constructed, yes, but in his short fiction he constructs minature origami masterpieces with the English language.

08. Books I don’t like: Craftless fiction. I can read a bad non-fiction book and still glean some knowledge, but reading artless fiction generally fills me with a white hot rage (even while acknowledging I can take away a better sense of how not to do things). I don’t have any examples off the top of my head. Danielle Steele, maybe? Harlequin Romances? Mack Bolan novels? Things you usually find on truck stop spinner racks.

09. Which book, out of the millions ever published, do you most wish never to read again? The Tommyknockers (which I read when it first arrived in paperback, sometime around 1988 or so) was the only book I’ve ever forced myself to finish and the end of a love affair with Stephen King’s writing that lasted me from about Grade 7 to Grade 10. Now I just stop reading when I lose that much interest with a book, but then I had to see if there was some grand plan at the finale. There wasn’t, and upon completion it became clear to me that he really doesn’t know how to end his books. I still have respect for Steve as a storyteller, but I think a little advance plotting would go a long way for his novels.

10. What’s on your book/reading wish list? If I’m to interpret this question as “What books do you desperately want to get next?” as opposed to “What books are kicking around the house in piles that you should get around to reading soon?” then the list would probably be:

- Manna From Heaven - Roger Zelazny
- Lulu on Hollywood - Louise Brooks
- World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War - Max Brooks
- Untitled Film Stills - Cindy Sherman
- Off the Books : The Underground Economy of the Urban Poor - Sudhir Alladi Venkatesh

I also have a paperback reading copy of Martin’s A Feast For Crows wending its way to me, and I’m rather curious about The Jennifer Morgue by Charles Stross.

11. What genre are most of your books? If I was going to cut my entire collection apart with broad strokes, I suppose I’d have to say the two most prevalent categories are probably graphic novels (which are overflowing their alotted bookshelf) and non-fiction. But I could subdivide those categories (manga, DC/Vertigo, Tintin; piracy, Vikings, Victoriana, Canadiana) again and again. My fiction collection could probably be summed up as “g33ky with nerdy leanings” and I’d be okay with that.

12. Can we see your bookshelves? Here’s how I had part of one of my bookshelves set up in my last house. I’ve switched things around a bit, but I still own all the books and it’s pretty representative of my collection in general. (Click through to an enlargement.)

First the rains came to Vancouver. They came and came and it poured and poured until the dirt broke loose and slid into our reservoirs and dirtied the water, so the officials told us to boil the tap water before we drank it and there was panic in the streets. People fought in stores for clean, bottled water. Well, some people did, anyway; the rest of us simply boiled what the taps gave us, ran it through a jug purifier in the fridge and looked cockeyed at everyone else who was yelling “THE SKY IS FALLING” (which, to be certain, it was, but it was more dampening and depressing than apolcalyptic).

Then, after a week and a half of boiling our slightly cloudy runoff (no worse than what you’d get from a creek, really) the sky fell again. White this time, and Vancouver, if not shut down exactly, certainly slowed down (like molasses in November). Over a foot fell within a couple of days–the worst in easy memory since 1998, and certainly the worst in several years. Reaction on the internet was swift.

“Haha, Vancouver! Finally! Now you get what you deserve!”

Meaning, I suppose, that because we are part of a temperate rainforest and consequently have much milder temperatures from the rest of Canada, we are feeble and have no idea how to comport ourselves in a colder winter setting; we are unused to what they receive elsewhere in the Great White North (as if residents anywhere else in Canada would happily take on our five to six months of constant rain–we’ve earned the right to a little credit on that front). But that’s true to a degree–of course Vancouverites don’t know how to drive in a foot of snow; the last time we saw a foot of snow was nearly a decade ago. Winter tires? What would we need those for? The day and a half of light snow coverage we usually get once a year? Yeah, maybe we are ill-prepared in that regard, but ask people in California where they keep their winter equipment and you’d probably get the same incredulous look a Vancouverite would shoot you.

To be honest, though, after walking home today, I think we did deserve this. The trip took me down a forested path along an embankment and creek–about six blocks of heavily gladed scenery. The snow had stopped; to the east the sun had finally started to come out and was lighting the mountains in pink. And the crisp stillness that hung in the air occurs so infequently in the city I could only stand and wonder at it.

Silence.

Total, absolute, insulated silence, save for the crackling of the snow and the periodic rustle of a snowfall deposit tumbling from one of its perches. And the woods, which normally would be a lattice of bare (and wet) branches, a repository of sticks waiting for spring, was instead a layered cobweb of white, stretching back tree by tree as far as you could see.

Vancouver in the summer in breathtaking in its beauty–the greens of the foliage and rich blue of the seas and sky–but this is a majesty that doesn’t come along often. Once a decade maybe. And if the rest of Canada gets to see this every year (I’m certain most of it does), then I’m envious, because winter in all her glory is something we rarely experience, and a glimpse of her perfect grace is something we’re long overdue in deserving to see.

(Incidentally, shortly after I got home I discovered they lifted the water boil advisory. One crisis per customer, apparently. )

One of the things I miss most about my decade in college radio and my editorial stint at a music magazine is being in the loop. Most of the time these days I have no idea what’s new, interesting or worth listening to. I just sit in my office and listen to the same music I listened to a decade ago, which is partly because, yes, I’m old and bitter and grouse about how music used to be better in the Indie Golden Days of the ’90s, but it’s also because I don’t even know where to look for quality product anymore.

Still, through the great sea of links that the internet’s comprised of, occasionally I’ll keep surfing until I end up on Youtube watching someone who is just so much to my taste it blows my mind. Like Jenny Lewis.

Uh-huh, I know that she fronted Rilo Kiley and did vocals for The Postal Service (or I do now, at least), but I never listened to either of them. Generally not to my taste. But twangy alt-country singer-songwriters like Neko Case and Kasey Chambers definitely are to my taste so I’m glad when (during random searches for stuff on Sarah Silverman) I can find new musicians to gleefully obsess about.

Jenny Lewis manages to find that absolutely essential C&W balance of heartbreaking and upbeat. Her voice, while confident and assured, can be softer and gentler than Loretta or Neko’s, but that just adds an extra layer of innocence and hurt to songs like “Rabbit Fur Coat” (the title track of her debut album). “Born Secular” turns the tradition of Christian-themed country songs on its ear, not only via the lyrics but through the inclusion of an extremely simple synthesizer percussion track, making what could have been horrendously inappropriate complementary and enriching instead. And there’s a few similar surprises included on the album. Rabbit Fur Coat is constantly more than what you’d hope for from a typical genre release and often so much more, usually in ways you don’t expect. I’m putting the entire CD onto my iPod and it’s not coming out for a good, long while.

So that’s my recommendation to you. If you’ve been, like me, living in a cave for the past year or two and like alt-country ladies, you should probably check out Ms. Lewis with The Watson Twins. All I ask in return is that you leave me comments with suggestions of stuff to listen to—any genre, I’m not too picky—because, frankly, being out of the loop is embarrassing, especially when I’m missing out on music this good.

I finally got to see the latest Ramones documentary End of the Century the other night. I say finally because anyone who knows me knows exactly how much influence the Ramones had on my adolescence, post-adolescence and, well, most of my life, really. I airbanded “Judy is a Punk” in front of my Grade Seven class (looking back on it, I still have no idea what any of my classmates might have thought of a gangly nerd mouthing the lyrics to a punk song in front of them) and over the years my fashion choices generally seem to have come from the wardrobes of one of the band (leather jacket, jeans, shaggy hair). So it’s a little surprising that I didn’t run down to the video store in a spastic fit as soon as it was released, but I didn’t and it somehow passed me by until now.

In any case, it was worth the wait. It’s a remarkably frank and unromantic movie (which is probably as it should be, considering the relationships of the band members), but it’s the most honest and upfront version of their story that you’re likely to hear (especially considering that three of the members are now dead). In fact, according to the quote on the front of the box, it was so accurate it left Johnny “disturbed.” And I suppose that’s fair, because for most of their two decades as a band they semed to generally hate one another. Joey and Johnny in particular shared a special kind of animosity (the kind that can only be achieved from stealing your bandmate’s girlfriend) that went on until Joey died. They went into the studio; they wrote music; they recorded music; they hit the road—year after year, all the while barely being able to stand being in the same room as one another. And that’s astounding. And it’s all on film.

It’s a sad story, but it is important—especially if you’re an armchair historian of punk culture or someone just interested in one of the most influential American rock bands. Gabba gabba hey.

Anyway, in honour of watching this, I thought I’d post some lyrics I think are appropriate. In my hometown, I was known (to a lesser degree) for my Joey Ramone impression. Indeed, a few of my friends (T.T. and LeeLee) and I (Chrissy) have talked for about the last decade or so about forming a Ramones tribute band (called Vindaloo Commando—a reference to both “I Just Want to Have Something to Do” and “Commando”). This hasn’t yet come to pass (although I still think it would be fuckin’ funny), but I still feel the need to share the joy, so—for the first time—here are the lyrics to Vindaloo’s Canadian history lesson “The FLQ Took My Baby Away”.

“The FLQ Took My Baby Away”

She went away for the holidays
Said she was going to Gaspé
But she never got there
She never got there
She never got there they say, yeah
(Repeat)

The FLQ took my baby away
They took her away, away from me
The FLQ took my baby away
They took her away, away from me

I don’t know where my baby can be
They took her from me, they took her from me
I don’t know where my baby can be
They took her from me, they took her from me

Ring me, ring me, ring me up Parliament
Find out where my baby went
Ring me, ring me, ring me up that Trudeau guy
And find out if my baby’s alive

Yeah yeah yeah
Oh oh oh oh oh

(Repeat lyrics as necessary)