Tag: Sheila Heti

2019 week seven

Book Read
7. Conversations With Friends – Sally Rooney

Kilometres Ran
week seven – 38.4

2019 to Date: 291 KM

I’m reminded of when Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? started getting armchair reviews from casual readers who hated it because they expected it to be a self-help book and they learned nothing about how to behave. That has nothing to do, per se, with Sally Rooney except to ask, is Rooney the Irish Heti? I find their style very similar, not to mention their telling of contemporary life. Rooney was born in Ireland and lives in Dublin, the primary setting of the book, which follows the narrator Frances and her self-absorbed friend Bobbi. Much like Heti’s breakout book, Rooney’s Conversations With Friends is a rather polarizing novel, with many people hating the pace, events, and characters. And while I too find some of the characters grating – I loathe Bobbi, for instance – I am on the love-it side of the continuum for this novel, and I’m looking forward to reading Rooney’s new novel Normal People after it is released in Canada in April.

Kiboshed plans for a double Stanley Park Seawall loop long run on Sunday. (The white streak in the water in the background is a capsized boat with a half dozen paddlers having a much worse day than I am.)

After racing the First Half Marathon last weekend, this week was pretty relaxed. Not because I wanted it to be but rather because I’m trying to do as I’m told, which is just as difficult as it sounds. After over three weeks straight of running every day, this week I was relegated to three short and one long run. It feels like a set back but I have to trust that I’m in good hands and I realize that all of this sounds rather vague because it is, because that’s all I want to put down about it for now. It’s now eleven weeks until the BMO Marathon and while I’ve been filling my non-running days (and some of my running days, too) with riding my bicycle, it feels like I should be running a lot more than four times, for under 40 KM in a week. Trust has never really been my forté.

2019 week five

Book Read
5. Motherhood – Sheila Heti

Kilometres Ran
week five – 40.0

2019 To Date: 198 KM

I suppose it shouldn’t come as too big of a surprise that I did not really enjoy reading a couple hundred pages about someone trying to decide whether on not to have a child but while I am no fan of children (in spite of the fact that people seem really excited to point out that I once was one as if that is the best argument that they can come up with) I am a fan of Sheila Heti, going back to her telephone conversation with Thea Bowering that appeared in The Capilano Review Issue 3:22 along with a really great short story called The Girl Who Planted Flowers. There were times reading Motherhood that I enjoyed and other times that I did not and quite a few times when I wondered if I’d misplaced the bookmark because damned if I hadn’t already read this once before. I’m glad that I read it and I’m not surprised that it was shortlisted for the 2018 Giller Prize but I’m forced to wonder if I give this book a pass because I’m a Heti fan. It is probably true that I would not have picked it up if it was written by another author.

Lunchtime at the office.

When I met with my physiotherapist last she said that if stuff was going okay that I am allowed to start increasing distance so I’ve made the dramatic increase from 5 KM last Sunday up to 6.6 KM today. My achilles feels okay but not great but not painful just the comes-and-goes sensation of imagine your achilles feels like dragging a string of wool across sandpaper. Not painful, but rather uncomfortable or annoying. I’ve taken the instruction to run less far, more frequently, and now have a 5-ish kilometres per day streak of 16 days and I next visit my physiotherapist on Friday when I will find out if I’m allowed to run the First Half on Sunday, February 10. I am not confident permission will be granted. But I am really curious to see what will happen if I am allowed to race given that my farthest run of the past three weeks is 8 KM some 18 days ago and it’s been over three weeks since I last ran more than 11 KM. My biggest issue weighing heavily on my mind is that in it now 13 weeks until the BMO Marathon and running less than a marathon per week is definitely not going to get me across the finish line anywhere near my goal time. And as much as I like the Half course I really do not want to have to downgrade to the 21.1 again this year.

week nineteen

Books Read:
31. Ticknor — Sheila Heti
32. Pound @ Guantanamo — Clint Burnham

Kilometres Ran:
this week — 48.72
to date — 607.16

I read Ticknor in one round-trip transit ride to-and-from work. It’s pretty short. But short is good sometimes too. You’ve noticed the amount of poetry in these posts, yes? Ticknor was not what I was expecting. It’s nothing like How Should a Person Be?. There were times when I was reading Ticknor and it felt like I was reading Kafka. My edition has an introduction by Ben Lerner and I didn’t bother reading it and then I finished Ticknor and I was around Nanaimo Station and still had another four stops on the Skytrain to go so I decided to take a look at what Benny had to say about the book and he writes that Ticknor reminds him of Kafka’s “The Next Village”. I don’t recall reading “The Next Village” and there’s a good chance that I have not. Yet, anyway. Maybe I should. I mentioned a couple weeks/posts ago the Talonbooks launch. Clint Burnham reading “No Poems on Stolen Land” from his collection Pount @ Guantanamo was far and away the best part of the evening. And most of the evening was pretty good. I like this collection. There’s a rather odd little shout-out to Poetry is Dead in the acknowledgements that I’m a bit confused by. There’s maybe a story there. Or maybe not. I really like Clint; I miss @prof_clinty in my Twitter feed.
week nineteen
Until lately I’ve been grossly ignorant about all the races, and I was lamenting the other day that it would be nice if there was a list somewhere. Well, there are a few, and I was just grossly ignorant when it came to my Googling. Be that as it may, I learned from a Skytrain Station ad that apparently if I sign up for and complete the Granville Island Turkey Trot 8 km race over Thanksgiving and the Fall Classic at UBC in mid November (probably the half marathon) then, along with the BMO ten days ago, I’ll have the RUNVAN Hat Trick. I think I might give it a shot. Registration closes on May 31 so I’ve a bit of time to decide, but I think I should just sign up before I convince myself to back out. The word “trot” though. I really dislike that word. I broke 600 kilometres somewhere around the lighthouse under the Lions Gate Bridge today, so that’s exciting. I’m 30 per cent away from my goal of 2,000 kilometres this year and 36.5 per cent through the year. I’m pretty happy with those numbers.