Read the Hammer
Hamilton is a city with an abundance of two things: resilience and writers. In spite of a global pandemic, these eight Hamilton writers are putting out brand new books this spring. Get to know their books and how Hamilton influences their writing below!
Kill the Mall. Pasha Malla. Knopf Canada. $25.00, 256 pp., ISBN: 978-0-735273-49-8
Pasha Malla
Kill the Mall, Knopf Canada, February 2021
About the Book
Douglas Adams meets David Lynch in this witty yet horror-tinged fable about one of North America's scariest inventions – the local mall.
After writing a letter in praise of "malls," our eccentric narrator is offered a "residency" at a shabby suburban shopping centre. His mission: to occupy the mall for several weeks, splitting his time between "making work" and "engaging the public," all while chronicling his adventures in weekly progress reports.
Before long, a series of strange after-hour events rattles our hero, and he sets forth on a nightly quest to untangle the mysterious forces at play in the mall's unmapped recesses. Things quickly get hairy, and our narrator's optimism about his mall residency descends into doubt, and then into a full-blown phantasmagoria of horror and (possibly) murder. With the aid of a weird and wonderful cast of mall-dwelling misfits – including a pony named Gary – our narrator is forced to conclude that the mall may not be the temple of consumer bliss he initially imagined, but something far more sinister. And who, or what, is benefitting from its existence?
Pasha Malla's creative genius shines in this madcap work of horror-fantasy – a cutting critique of consumer culture as embodied in the fading local mall.
Q&A With Pasha Malla
What does it mean to you to be a Hamilton area author?
Being an author anywhere is pretty sweet work if you can get it! I appreciate being a Hamilton-area person, certainly. I really like this city.
What has the experience of writing during a pandemic looked like for you?
Bad. I haven't written very much at all.
What is the one place in Hamilton you have missed being able to go to the most during the pandemic? Give a shout-out to a local business and tell us why it’s great.
Wass, the Ethiopian restaurant on James Street South. I miss going there with my partner and sharing a delicious veggie combo and drinking a giant Tusker beer and watching people's feet go by out the ground-floor window – a bit like Cheers, but with injera and variegated lentils instead of wise-cracking alcoholics.
What is one book written by a local (Hamilton and surrounding area) author that you’re looking forward to reading, or that you’ve already read and loved?
I'm excited for Joe Ollmann's new book. I liked The Abominable Mr. Seabrook a lot.
Half Life. Krista Foss. McClelland & Stewart. $24.95, 328 pp., ISBN: 978-0771036-49-1
Krista Foss
Half Life, McClelland & Stewart, March 2021.
About the Book
A raw, absorbing, tender, and witty novel about a woman's long-overdue reckoning with memory, truth, and the multiverse of familial love.
Elin Henriksen is a middle-aged single parent under pressure. Her formidable mother's health is declining, her fearless teenage daughter wants to leave but won't say where, and the new high school principal has problems with her unorthodox teaching of physics.
And then there is the upcoming ceremony at the Art Museum. In ten days, a gallery will be named after her late father, Tig Henriksen, a modernist furniture designer whose sought-after cult pieces hide a troubled narrative. With a mixture of anticipation and dread, Elin prepares to reunite with her once-estranged siblings – Mette, a free-spirited singer-songwriter, and the serious, emotionally distant architect Casper – hoping they'll finally grapple with hard truths they've so far refused to accept.
In the countdown to the event, as her daughter's risk-taking mounts, her mother's fragility intensifies and strange packages land on her doorstep (including a yellow-eyed dog), Elin's only relief is confiding to a dead physicist.
Struggling with the paradoxes of truth and clarity, love and witness, genius and ambition, and her own ambivalent connection to her confessor, she inches toward confronting not just the explosive potential of memory but the costly fallout of silence.
Told with dazzling insight, intelligence, and compassion, Half Life is a beautifully rendered story about family truths and the profound human need to be believed.
Q&A with Krista Foss
What does it mean to you to be a Hamilton area author?
Tough question for me. By the end of this year, it’s likely I won’t be living in Hamilton. My partner and I don’t know exactly where we’ll end up – somewhere between Ottawa and Kingston – or what kind of life we’ll lead, urban or rural. There’s an adventure to that, but also loss.
Though I think I will always be a Hamiltonian. There’s that curve in the 403 heading west, just after the highway 6 turnoff, when the vista to the right widens into the cloudy gemstone of Cootes Paradise, and for as long as I can remember, that view tells me I’m home – this incongruous city sitting in the remnants of a glacial lake, green and busy with Carolinian forest at its edges, scarred by industry and sprawl. There’s desperation and beauty here. It’s the perfect place to be a writer. Or to write about – which I might be able to do, finally, when I have some distance from it.
Still, I’ll l keep rounding that bend; there are too many people I love in this city.
What has the experience of writing during a pandemic looked like for you?
I haven’t written as much as I would have liked or imagined. Because my partner left for his dream job in another city at the very beginning of the pandemic, I’ve had a lot of quiet, a lot of time alone in a big dusty house. Much of that I filled with anxiety, but there was also a great deal of contemplation about our collective vulnerability, how so much of what we obsess about is meaningless.
I’ve also obsessed about those meaningless things, apologized repeatedly to my dog and cat, binge-watched, eaten poorly, neglected housekeeping, coached a lot of writers, edited many manuscripts and collaborated on and completed a screenplay which was recently optioned.
That collaboration with writer Sally Cooper and filmmaker/auteur Terrance Odette happened with titrations of trust, endurance, low-brow humor and talking each other through the hitches of Zoom, Final Draft and global uncertainty. But it happened, and I’m amazed and grateful for that.
What is the one place in Hamilton you have missed being able to go to the most during the pandemic? Give a shout-out to a local business and tell us why it’s great.
Coffee shops, especially Ark + Anchor Espresso Bar on King West. I spent many hours in its sunny second floor, writing, eating fritters, but also laughing and having heart-to-heart talks with fellow writer Sally Cooper. I think we both finished novels there, and we worked on two screenplays together. We started our collaboration with Terry Odette there too. The atmosphere that Patrick and Yigi have created is hip and literary, and the coffee and food is excellent. They’re wonderful to chat with. It’s still open for take-out. But I hanker for that second floor.
What is one book written by a local (Hamilton and surrounding area) author that you’re looking forward to reading, or that you’ve already read and loved?
Right now, I’m reading Denise Davy’s Her Name Was Margaret: Life and Death on the Streets for a gritLIT book club discussion I’m leading. It’s an astounding achievement of research and compassion. And that nexus of homelessness, mental illness and our failures, can’t be talked about enough.
But seriously, I expect to be reading all of the releases by local writers – there’s unbelievable talent in this city – and I’ve already purchased most of them. So there are many gorgeous words and images waiting for me.
Fictional Father. Joe Ollmann. Drawn & Quarterly. $29.95, 212 pp., ISBN: 978-1-770464-63-6
Joe Ollmann
Fictional Father, Drawn & Quarterly, May 2021
About the Book
A recovering alcoholic lives in the shadow of a world famous comic strip and its tyrannical creator.
Caleb is a middle-aged painter with a non-starter career and a checkered past. He also happens to be the only child of one of the world’s most famous cartoonists, Jimmi Wyatt. Known for the internationally beloved father and son comic Sonny Side Up, Jimmi made millions drawing saccharine family stories while neglecting his own son.
Now sober, Caleb is haunted by his wasted past and struggling to take responsibility for his present before it’s too late. His always patient boyfriend, James, is reaching the end of his rope. When Caleb gets the chance to step out from his father’s shadow and shape the most public aspect of the family business, he makes every bad decision and watches his life fall apart. Is it too late to repair the harm? Are we forever doomed to make the same mistakes our parents did?
Q&A With Joe Ollmann
What does it mean to you to be a Hamilton area author?
Right now, it seems like there's a LOT of writers in Hamilton with books coming out, so it feels exciting to be part of that community. I'm also proud to be part of the community of cartoonists in this city. I like to think that this city, for all its faults, still has a working class union mentality in its soul that permeates a lot of the art that comes out of it.
What has the experience of writing during a pandemic looked like for you?
Ha! Visions of utilizing all this extra time evaporated quickly. I did finish a book during the first six months of this thing, but there's very little in terms of follow-up. I have lost a lot of the work ethic (unhealthy work ethic?) I had before this. I used to work 'til late every night, but I slowly evolved to quitting earlier, reading more and listening to records at night. I kind of pass it off like all the other unhealthy things we're letting slide during this, like people going toward whatever brings them comfort and doing it too much, whether it's junk food, or booze, or for me, not working all the time.
What is the one place in Hamilton you have missed being able to go to the most during the pandemic? Give a shout-out to a local business and tell us why it’s great.
I miss breakfast in diners the most. Like, I dream of this, and breakfast is not optimal for takeout. The places I will be doing my breakfast tour week when this is over are: The Valley Charcoal Pit (Dundas), Russel Williams (Burlington), Breezy Corners (Flamborough) and Steve's Open Kitchen (James St.) I have thought a lot about this.
What is one book written by a local (Hamilton and surrounding area) author that you’re looking forward to reading, or that you’ve already read and loved?
I'm looking forward to reading all the new books coming out from all the Hamilton authors. I work at a bookstore, so I have to try and keep up. It is expected, and you disappoint customers if you have not read every book in the store, and you can't fake it all the time; “I've heard really good things about tis one…” But a few of my older Hamilton favourites are Hamilton Illustrated by Dave Collier, excerpts from his sketchbooks that capture the soul of this city for good and bad, and The Donnelly Album by Ray Fazakas, an old true crime book that always fascinated me.
The Centaur’s Wife. Amanda Leduc. Random House Canada. $24.95, 320 pp., ISBN: 978-0-735272-85-9
Amanda Leduc
The Centaur’s Wife, Random House Canada, February 2021.
About the Book
Amanda Leduc's brilliant new novel, woven with fairy tales of her own devising and replete with both catastrophe and magic, is a vision of what happens when we ignore the natural world and the darker parts of our own natures.
Heather is sleeping peacefully after the birth of her twin daughters when the sound of the world ending jolts her awake. Stumbling outside with her babies and her new husband, Brendan, she finds that their city has been destroyed by falling meteors and that her little family are among only a few who survived.
But the mountain that looms over the city is still green – somehow it has been spared the destruction that has brought humanity to the brink of extinction. Heather is one of the few who know the mountain, a place city-dwellers have always been forbidden to go. Her dad took her up the mountain when she was a child on a misguided quest to heal her legs, damaged at birth. The tragedy that resulted has shaped her life, bringing her both great sorrow and an undying connection to the deep magic of the mountain, made real by the beings she and her dad encountered that day: Estajfan, a centaur born of sorrow and of an ancient, impossible love, and his two siblings, marooned between the magical and the human world. Even as those in the city around her – led by Tasha, a charismatic doctor who fled to the city from the coast with her wife and other refugees – struggle to keep everyone alive, Heather constantly looks to the mountain, drawn by love, by fear, by the desire for rescue. She is torn in two by her awareness of what unleashed the meteor shower and what is coming for the few survivors, once the green and living earth makes a final reckoning of the usefulness of human life and finds it wanting.
At times devastating, but ultimately redemptive, Amanda Leduc's fable for our uncertain times reminds us that the most important things in life aren't things at all, but rather the people we want by our side at the end of the world.
Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted. Gary Barwin. Random House Canada. $32.00, 344 pp., ISBN: 978-0-735279-52-0
Gary Barwin
Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy, Random House Canada, March 2021
About the Book
A middle-aged Jewish man who fantasizes about being a cowboy goes on an eccentric quest across Europe after the 1941 Nazi invasion of Lithuania in this wild and witty yet heartrending novel from the bestselling author of Yiddish for Pirates, shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize.
Motl is middle-aged, poor, nerdy, Jewish and in desperate need of a shave. Since having his balls shot cleanly off as a youth in WWI, he's lived a quiet life at home in Vilnius with his shrewd and shrewish mom, Gitl, losing himself in the masculine fantasy world of cowboy novels by writers like Karl May – novels equally loved by Hitler, whose troops have just invaded Lithuania and are out to exterminate people like Motl. In his dreams, Motl is a fast-talking, rugged, expert gunslinger capable of dealing with the Nazi threat. But only in his dreams.
As friends and neighbours are killed around them, Motl and Gitl escape from Vilnius, saving their own skins. But they immediately risk everything to try rescue relatives they hope are still alive. With death all around him, Motl decides that a Jew's best revenge is not only to live, but to procreate. In order to achieve this, though, he must relocate those most crucial pieces of his anatomy lost to him in a glacier in the Swiss Alps in the previous war. It's an absurd yet life-affirming mission, made even more urgent when he's separated from his mother, and isn't sure whether she's alive or dead. Joining forces, and eventually hearts, with Esther, a Jewish woman whose family has been killed, Motl ventures across Europe, a kaleidoscope of narrow escapes and close encounters with everyone from Himmler, to circus performers, double agents, quislings, fake "Indians" and real ones. Motl at last figures out that he has more connection to the Indigenous characters in western novels than the cowboys.
An imaginative and deeply felt exploration of genocide, persecution, colonialism and masculinity – saturated in Gary Barwin's sharp wit and perfect pun-play – Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy is a one-of-a-kind novel of sheer genius.
Q&A With Gary Barwin
What does it mean to you to be a Hamilton area author?
Beyond easy access to the inscrutable delights of Roma pizza, I enjoy how Hamilton is always considering itself, redefining itself but always also looking out at other places, thinking about how we’re seen; comparing but not caring, but also caring. And I like being a Hamilton author for the rich web of friendships, community and crossovers in the arts. Living in Hamilton is being in the centre of something, but yet is also being off-centre, looking out at other centres, being an alternate and not the pre-eminent city. Hamilton is always a paradox, an unanswered question, and I find that a great position to be in as a writer.
What has the experience of writing during a pandemic looked like for you?
For me, in the face of uncertainty, anxiety and the great need to connect and be in conversation with others, I’ve made lots of work. Writing, music, visuals, videos. What to do? Try to connect. Try to create. It’s the best tool I have. To examine, to check in with myself, to try to figure out how I’m feeling and how others are feeling, to think about the moment, the past, the future. To dissipate the sense of having no agency in all this. I can make stuff. It gives me agency and it lets me share that with others—to reach out and not touch, but speak to other. So I’ve been manically making work, sharing it on social media, sending it out to publishers, releasing albums, collaborating. In addition to my own work, I’ve written and/or published several collaborative books. I think I now know that if I were a caveman, and a mammoth came charging at me, I’d start scribbling on the cave walls and sing. And then I’d probably be lunch, but lunch who left a prolific trail.
What is the one place in Hamilton you have missed being able to go to the most during the pandemic? Give a shout-out to a local business and tell us why it’s great.
I have been really grateful to be able to spend a lot of time in the woods, fields, ravines and in-betweens. That has been the greatest consolation and restorative. And I’ve visited in some limited way some local bookstores (nature returns!) and attended a bunch of online events, both musical and literary. I think I’m at that stage of the pandemic where I don’t really know what I’m missing. It’s the same thing with eating. I feel hungry for something, though I can’t quite tell what. I do know that I am hankering for some live performances – Zula Presents Something Else series and LitLive are both things I can’t wait to see live. Zula presents a wide range of exciting and fascinating music in the experimental, jazz and creative music traditions often at the Rock on Locke. I also go to the Rock on Locke Hammer Baroque series – lots of truly beautiful early music performed in the series with intimacy and sensitivity. And of course LitLive which was at the Staircase Theatre features 6 writers, both local and from all over Canada, reading their work each month.
What is one book written by a local (Hamilton and surrounding area) author that you’re looking forward to reading, or that you’ve already read and loved?
I’ve just read Krista Foss’s Half Life and Amanda Leduc’s The Centaur’s Wife – both of which I loved, and have Pasha Malla’s Kill the Mall cued up for reading next, and of course, I’ll read David Lee’s The Medusa Deep – heck, I have to, I play music with David over Zoom each week, but know I’ll enjoy it as much as the chthulian tentacularity of his last book. I just got Franco Cortese’s Lip in the mail – a collection of experimental poetry by this brilliant pataphysical language alchemist from the Niagara Peninsula and can’t wait to dive in. Also, Sacha Archer (of Burlington) has been making really, really beautiful rubberstamp visual poetry most recently in his collection, Mother’s Milk.
Her Name Was Margaret. Denise Davy. James Street North Books. $22.00, 300 pp., ISBN: 978-1-989496-32-9
Denise Davy
Her Name Was Margaret: Life and Death in the Streets, James Street North Books, March 2021.
About the Book
Margaret Jacobson was a sweet-natured young girl who played the accordion and had dreams of becoming a teacher until she had a psychotic break in her teens, which sent her down a much darker path. Her Name Was Margaret traces Margaret's life from her childhood to her death as a homeless woman on the streets of Hamilton, Ontario. With meticulous research and deep compassion author Denise Davy analyzed over eight hundred pages of medical records and conducted interviews with Margaret's friends and family, as well as those who worked in psychiatric care, to create this compelling portrait of a woman abandoned by society.
Through the revolving door of psychiatric admissions to discharges to rundown boarding homes, Davy shows us the grim impact of deinstutionalization: patients spiralled inexorably toward homelessness and death as psychiatric beds were closed and patients were left to fend for themselves on the streets of cities across North America. Today there are more 235,000 people in Canada who are counted among the homeless annually and 35,000 who are homeless on any given night. Most of them are struggling with mental health issues. Margaret's story is a heartbreaking illustration of what happens in our society to our most vulnerable and should serve as a wake-up call to politicians and leaders in cities across Canada.
Q&A with Denise Davy
What does it mean to you to be a Hamilton area author?
It means a lot to be part of this ferocious group of writers who dared to launch books during a global pandemic. Kudos to all of you!
What has the experience of writing during a pandemic looked like for you?
I found it easier to write because when the world slowed down and became a quieter, there were fewer distractions. I so wish we could keep some of the changes that have taken place but I don’t see it happening.
What is the one place in Hamilton you have missed being able to go to the most during the pandemic? Give a shout-out to a local business and tell us why it’s great.
I love the Mulberry Café. I miss the gritty décor, delicious date squares, outside patio, friendly staff and did I mention the date squares.
What is one book written by a local (Hamilton and surrounding area) author that you’re looking forward to reading, or that you’ve already read and loved?
I really can’t single out one. I have Boy, The Centaur’s Wife and Half Life on my bedside table and plan to buy more. They are all a testimony to the fertile imagination among Hamilton writers.
The Medusa Deep. David Neil Lee. Poplar Press. $15.00, 200 pp., ISBN: 978-1-989496-31-2
David Neil Lee
The Medusa Deep, Poplar Press, June 2021.
About the Book
Nate Silva is back battling monsters in The Medusa Deep, the long-awaited follow-up to David Neil Lee's award-winning young adult novel, The Midnight Games. After finally finding The Sorcerer, the airship that disrupted the last midnight game, Nate is kidnapped by the crew and pressed into dangerous service in the fight against the Great Old Ones, ending up on the shores of the Pacific Ocean. There H.P. Lovecraft reappears and Nate discovers a grandfather he never knew he had, a grandfather who has kept a carefully maintained harpoon gun for decades. With a group of scientists on the scene determined to investigate the uncanny Medusa Deep, things soon start to get complicated. All the while, Nate knows something is happening back home in Hamilton. Will he be able to return in time?
Q&A with David Neil Lee
What does it mean to you to be a Hamilton area author?
It’s a city that has enabled me to do a lot of things. When I wanted to get an MA, no grad program in the country would take me (because of my lousy undergraduate English marks from UBC). The grad coordinator at McMaster’s MA in Music Criticism program (unfortunately the university no longer offers this) phoned me at my home in Madeira Park, so we moved from the West Coast to Hamilton. This experience sort of jump-started me as a writer; my MA thesis soon became a book, etc. And I did my Ph.D. at Guelph, which is just up the road. A lot of things are accessible from Hamilton.
What has the experience of writing during a pandemic looked like for you?
Overall it has been rotten. For a number of reasons, as if my latest book, The Medusa Deep, hadn’t already taken me too long to write, the pandemic delayed it even more. Although in lockdown I’m able to work at home, and have more time than ever on my hands, I find that I don’t get tons of writing done – like a lot of people, I find that I’m even worse organized than usual. I miss the ideas that come from the stimulation of being in the outside world, that come from having experiences (remember those?), however banal. The uncertainty of anything ever getting published ever again (everyone’s in that same boat of course, but I’m only worrying about myself) is not a great incentive. On the other hand, it’s been a good opportunity to reflect upon and critique the whole idea of ambition. But having reflected and critiqued, I’m ready to move on.
What is the one place in Hamilton you have missed being able to go to the most during the pandemic? Give a shout-out to a local business and tell us why it’s great.
Every week or two I would go to The Brain on James Street, and I miss doing that. I hope they manage to survive and re-open. On the other hand, we’ve been getting take-out from the Capital Bar near us, and once during a more relaxed phase of lockdown, I even sat and had a beer while I waited for my order. That felt like a holiday to a distant and exotic place. Occasionally I’ve been able to drop in on the local bookstores, thank goodness, and in fact I’m buying more books than usual - one here & one there from this and that local bookstore – partly out of principle and partly because the libraries aren’t always accessible. I miss browsing at the Central HPL, and/or Mills Library out at Mac, but these days I just drop by the Barton branch to pick up holds.
What is one book written by a local (Hamilton and surrounding area) author that you’re looking forward to reading, or that you’ve already read and loved.
I feel like I kind of know the same writers you know, so naming one of them and not another seems as if it would be I don’t know, facile, even unfair. Hey, a few years ago I heard a local writer read at the Staircase – I think she’s from Iran and she was really funny. I forget her name, but if she’s got a book out, I want to read it. A lot of people write humour, but are not actually very funny, but this woman’s stuff was funny – do you know who I mean?*
*after many queries through the complex Hamilton literary community, the editors determined that David was referring to Showey Yazdanian.
Nothing But Life. Brent van Staalduinen. Dundurn Press. $14.99, 304 pp., ISBN: 978-1-459746-18-3
Brent van Staalduinen
Nothing But Life, Dundurn Press, February 2021.
About the Book
During a sweltering summer, Dills must come to terms with a horrific crime and the parent he loves who committed it.
Dills and his mom have returned to Hamilton, her hometown, hoping to leave the horrors of Windsor behind. But it’s impossible to escape the echoes of tragedy, and trouble always follows trouble.
When Dills hurts a new classmate, it comes out in court that he was in the Windsor High library when the shooter came in. But he won’t talk about what he saw, what he still sees whenever he closes his eyes. He can’t. He definitely can’t tell anyone that the Windsor Shooter is his stepfather, Jesse, that Jesse can speak into his mind from hundreds of kilometres away, and that Dills still loves him even though he committed an unspeakable crime.
Q&A with Brent van Staalduinen
What does it mean to you to be a Hamilton area author?
I’m a foreign-service brat, so my family moved around a lot, germinating in me a wanderlust that has carried through much of my adult life. When my wife and I returned to Canada after teaching abroad, much to our surprise we landed here: neither of us is from Hamilton, and although we’re both graduates of Redeemer University, we saw ourselves in a lot of other places. Well, ten years, a library job, home ownership, two daughters, and four books later (each of which prominently features Hamilton), it’s amazing to say that this wonderful city has indeed become home. It’s also an up-and-coming artistic and literary destination: to be a part of that is rewarding as well.
What has the experience of writing during a pandemic looked like for you?
Busy. Most of my pandemic time has been spent being husband, daddy, and homeschool teacher, all of which have kept me on my toes away from my craft. Still, I’ve been privileged to put two novels out into the world during the upheaval (Boy last September and Nothing But Life this February), so promoting and launching those has almost been a full-time job. The wordsmithing itself carries on apace, too: putting words together is my joy and happy place, so almost every pandemic morning has found me in front of my screen, making story. The worries and stresses we’re all experiencing have also been very real, but for me they’ve particularly manifested in my reading habits: in short, my intake is way down, and I’ve been generally unable to read heavier “literary” work. Potboilers, thrillers, and adventure novels have made up most of my literary diet…when I manage to drag my behind away from Netflix.
What is the one place in Hamilton you have missed being able to go to the most during the pandemic? Give a shout-out to a local business and tell us why it’s great.
My goodness, I’ve missed strolling King William: shouts out to Relay Coffee, HMBRGR, and Sagarmatha. (I’ve also really missed going to Forge FC games in person at TH Field – does that count?)
What is one book written by a local (Hamilton and surrounding area) author that you’re looking forward to reading, or that you’ve already read and loved.
I’m excited to read The Centaur’s Wife by Amanda Leduc, but am saving it for when I’m more in a mode to love beautiful writing. Her work demands a keen appreciation for excellent character and storyweaving, and I plan to spend some serious time with her book once my attention span returns.