might as well be spring.

This weird mild winter is really throwing off my reading habits. Normally I spend the frigid months diving into deep, challenging books, the kind of books that are a perfect accompaniment to curling up in the fetal position for hours on end with a cat sleeping at your feet. Books that help ward off the malaise and moping of dark days and snowy nights by throwing you into an intellectual and/or psychological firestorm. Books like The Waves, by Virginia Woolf. Or the collected poems of pretty much anyone in the twentieth century.

But so far this winter, I've only gotten through one of those--Blue Nights by Joan Didion, which broke my heart and blew my mind. If I can ever craft a sentence as finely as she can, I will die a happy woman. Other than that, I can't seem to wrap my head around anything too complicated. These mild days and unseasonable temperatures have thrown me into an early spell of spring fever.

Here's the thing, though: I love spring fever. The dizzying exhilaration of going out without a coat, the short attention span that accompanies longer days, the sight of the first snowdrops, the vaguely melancholic transition into a season of first blooms and first kisses. I wholeheartedly welcome the chance to basically moon about and flake out for longer than usual. I don't feel obligated to learn anything new right now, because I know I'm not going to retain it anyway. So as far as my reading goes, I like to take this time of year to re-read books that I love, books that make me feel happy and sad at the same time, books about confusing and consuming crushes. Books for smart girls.

Here's what I like to read when the fever sets in.

Girl by Blake Nelson. Blake Nelson is pretty much my teen novel hero--I've written before about how significant his short stories in Sassy magazine were for my own writing, and some of these stories were in fact excerpts from Girl. It's the story of a teenage girl in Portland in the mid-90s, of the blossoming indie-grunge scene in the Pacific Northwest, of the fragile and tender and hilarious ways we fall in love when we're too young to know what we're doing. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Here is one of my favourite passages, from the part when Andrea is on a long bus ride home from camp after the summer she lost her virginity to a random metalhead at camp with whom she might be in love (but probably isn't):

Even with millions of boys to choose from it was so complicated and there was so much politics about cliques and who your friends were and who was your type. And as we pulled into Portland I had this horrible feeling of wanting to go back to Brad because what if that's all there was? What if that was as close as you got? And I called my dad from the station and he was freaking out because I hadn't called. So then I just sat there waiting for him, staring at my dirty tennis shoes and thinking how incredibly stupid I was if I expected life to be anything else but failed love and mindless sex and crying all night in bus stations.

It's an empowering heartbreaker in the sweetest way.

The Wonder Spot by Melissa Bank. Another one I've probably written and talked about more times than is healthy or relevant, but shit, man, this book is just incredible. Fans of dry humour, episodic and memoiristic novels, making fun of the term "bildungsroman," New York City, and ill-fated yet strangely optimistic entanglements will die of happiness. It is also the book that contains what I think is the best-placed literary reference in modern fiction, to Bartleby the Scrivener by Herman Melville. You kind of have to read it to get it. And you don't have to be a Melville fan, I promise.

Hark! A Vagrant by Kate Beaton. This isn't a full-on re-read per se, since the book just came out, but since I'd already read many of her strips online, I'm allowing it. Kate Beaton is a nerdy intellectual hipster's dream come true. Here is one of my favourite strips.

So that's your reading list. And this song is your soundtrack.

au revoir, oughts.

It's been a banner year for me, and as usual, as I come to the end of 2Cait9 I make the realization that I've been so caught up in the pure winningness that is my life these days that I've forgotten to keep track of whether the things I loved in this last year of the decade were actually released in the last year. I'm pretty sure most of them weren't. I'm gonna go by some 2009-specific stuff on iTunes now but here's a list of the Best of Everything, 2009, to keep you occupied.

Best move: Ottawa to Kingston.

Best non-moving-related decision: forsaking vegetarianism and eating a lot of bacon (and also, a bird).

Best private radio discovery: 98.9 The Drive. For real! hardly any commercials and they reintroduced Banditos by The Refreshments into my life. If only we could somehow convince their lobotomized idiot DJs to never, ever speak ("We call it essential alternative because we play music that is essentially alternative! EXTREME!").

Best public radio standby: Wire Tap with Jonathan Goldstein.

Best book set in the grainy, sepia toned streets of 1970s New York involving latchkey children and the 20000$ Pyramid: When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead.


Best love-hate relationship: Q, with Jian Ghomeshi. (Seriously though, Moxy Fruvous was fucking awesome. This song was the best.)

Best terrifying dystopia: The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.

Best re-read: The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing by Melissa Bank.

Best Batman comic: All Star Batman and Robin, Volume 1, by Frank Miller and Jim Lee.

Best emo comic memoir: Funny Misshapen Body by Jeffrey Brown.

Best superficially stupid movie that is actually awesome and involves Muppets: Forgetting Sarah Marshall. (Oh Jason Segel, you have my heart.)

Best song that totally reaffirmed my faith in pop rock when it came out and then slowly, so slowly, made me want to gauge holes in my eardrums whenever I hear it: Help, I'm Alive by Metric.


Best musical rediscovery: Pavement.

Subsequent best song of all time discovery: Stereo by Pavement.

Best show: Plaskett at the Charles Bronson Centre. Or maybe, just maybe, the sheer anticipation of possessing orchestra level seats for Wilco at the NAC this winter. That might be better than all the shows in the world lined up in a row.

Best non-Plaskett album that actually came out in 2009: Hold Time by M. Ward.

Best friends: every last one of you.