
IF A BOOK’S BEEN CALLED POETIC, I PROBABLY WON’T LIKE IT
Our Type Reader for July is Peter Merriman
Peter Merriman is a
fixture of Type Books’ Queen West store, as he is of the Trinity-Bellwoods
neighbourhood in general. The founder of a now-defunct Denis Johnson book club
(“ALL WILL BE SAVED: Two Novels by Denis Johnson”), he can be found slinging hot Americanos
(among other things) at the nearby White Squirrel Coffee Shop, debating the number of
episodes Frasier ran as captain of The
Murphy Group, the most-hated team at Ossington’s Sunday night trivia matches, or
expressing his dismay that George Saunders refused to inscribe his full name (first
and last), as he prefers, in his copy of Pastoralia.
We sat down with local
book hound Peter and gave him
the Type Reader questionnaire to find out about his love of Calvin and Hobbes, his dislike of baby boomers, and his ambivalence about books while travelling:
PETER ANSWERS THE TYPE QUESTIONNAIRE
What
is the first book you remember loving?
If
comics count as books, then the first book I remember not only loving, but
being excited for the release of, was Calvin
and Hobbes (1987). I think I first read the strip while visiting my grandparents,
and immediately fell in love with it. The
Hamilton Spectator didn’t run it at the time, so my dad (or his co-worker?)
would cut out strips from the Burlington newspaper, which I would keep in a
photo album. Having an entire nine-month run of the strip in one book was
amazing.
What is your favourite virtue in a
book?
A
lack of florid prose. If a book’s been called ‘poetic,’ I probably won’t like
it. A nice cover doesn’t hurt.
What do you appreciate most in a book character?
Bitterness, a sense
of humour, dishonesty. A willingness to let situations get out of hand.
What
character (real or fictional) do you dislike the most?
The first
character that comes to mind is Patricia Lockwood’s father, from her recent
memoir Priestdaddy. He really came
across as a monster of a man in his selfishness and sense of entitlement. This
could be my own predisposition towards hating baby boomers in general, but he
really epitomized what I despise most about the (straight, white, American) men
of that generation. Thankfully, Lockwood’s one of the funniest writers alive.
Your
favourite prose authors?
Joan
Didion, Bret Easton Ellis, Paula Fox, John Haskell, Amy Hempel, Sheila Heti,
Denis Johnson, Deborah Levy, David Markson, Tom McCarthy, Derek McCormack,
Steven Millhauser, Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, Joseph O’Neill, Christine Schutt,
David Foster Wallace, P. G. Wodehouse.
Your
favourite poets?
Like
my taste in prose, my poetry reading tends to run pretty middle-brow. I’d love
to one day graduate to late Ashbery, but in truth I tend to read more
conversational verse like Tony Hoagland, David Berman, or David Trinidad.
Your
favourite book illustrators?
Edward Gorey and Quentin Blake probably?
Do you
read on public transportation?
Yes,
pretty regularly. I think a sign of a good book is me missing my stop.
What
qualities do you want in a book you’re reading while traveling?
I
think the writing has to be especially engrossing to distract me from strange
surroundings, so I don’t actually read a lot while travelling. But I do remember
really enjoying both William Maxwell’s novel, The Folded Leaf, and Alice Munro’s short story “Too Much Happiness,”
(in a Harper’s) while at cottages. I
couldn’t tell you what those two works have in common though.
What
book have you never read but have always meant to? Do you think you will ever
read it?
Staying
with the travel theme, I tried to read Blood
Meridian in Santa Fe once, but no dice. I’ve made three goes at A Confederacy of Dunces, so I’m not very
optimistic about ever finishing it. I read one-and-a-half books into Proust about
15 years ago, and he’s definitely someone I would like to read all the way
through at some point. I’m cautiously optimistic I’ll get through In Search of Lost Time one day.
If
you were to write a non-fiction book about anything, what would it be about?
I’d
love to write a local history of anti-capitalist graffiti found in kitchens.
If
you could force a single celebrity to read a specific book in its entirety, who
would you chose, and what book would you make them read?
He may have read it already, but I’d love to hear
George Saunders’s thoughts on Derek McCormack’s excellent novel, The Well-Dressed Wound. There’s enough
overlap in subject matter and themes between The Well-Dressed Wound and Saunders’ own Lincoln in the Bardo that he’d probably have something pretty interesting
to say about it.
What
book do you pretend to have read, but in fact have not?
Lincoln
in the Bardo.
What
book(s) are you reading right now?
Fiction:
The SOHO Press Book of 80s Short Fiction
and Writers Who Love Too Much: New
Narrative Writing 1977–1997. Non-: The
Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer and Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors.
photography of Peter Merriman by Paul Dotey