Michael is well read.

Michael Hingston is an Edmonton-based Arts reporter who specializes in Literature. You should bookmark his blog Too Many Books in the Kitchen ⎯ it’s a good read about reads.

What kind of a reader are you?
It’s so hard to know the answer to this, isn’t it? I mean, who knows how other people actually process literature? It wasn’t until my second year of university that I realized I had never read a book properly before.

My broad sense is that I’m pretty attentive on a sentence-by-sentence basis. I can follow structure and long-form metaphors; I’m awful with remembering plots and what characters look like. I ignore dream sequences.

But mostly I’m easily distracted—which is to say that I’ve never been the type to sit down and methodically knock off one author’s collected works. I’m always looking over my shoulder, trying to keep tabs on a hundred different things at once. No matter what I’m reading, it’s the wrong thing: too many short story collections, or not enough in translation, or too many American males who’ve been blurbed by Michael Chabon.

What book do you pretend to have read, but never actually have?
I think I have a pretty good track record for being honest about my blind spots, actually. On the other hand, when I tell people my two favourite novels are Moby-Dick and Don Quixote, I’m pretty sure half the time they think I’m full of shit anyway.

Tell me about the last book you couldn’t put down.
That’d be Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, David Lipsky’s travelogue of a road trip he went on with David Foster Wallace in 1996. It’s 300 pages of more or less raw transcription, and it’s intoxicating. I tried to savour the experience of hanging out in a car and watching explosion-y action movies with one of my literary idols, but one night looked up and realized I’d devoured the last third without even thinking. Whoops.

How has your job influenced your reading habits?
I’m a government bureaucrat from 9 to 5, which means each work day is filled with several mandatory “coffee breaks”. So I mostly read in 10-page chunks. I also read on public transit to and from work—one more reason to dread the onset of bike season every year, when I’m forced to keep the books in my backpack and focus on not getting run over by SUVs the size of my house.

How do you get the books that you read – buy, borrow, trade?
Mostly I buy. I almost never borrow books because I’m a compulsive margin-scribbler. (Sometimes I do let other people borrow mine—but if it comes back with a bent spine, I will bend your spine. Real talk.) And lately I’ve been getting back into those library things.

What character or author would you like to call your friend?
Oh, probably none of them. I like the relationship I already have with these people. Most of them would turn out to be bastards anyway.

Michael’s Must Reads
Chris Bachelder’s U.S.!
Moby-Dick.
Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.
Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America.
Oliver Jeffers’s The Great Paper Caper. (True, this is a kids’ book about a paper airplane contest—but there’s one wordless panel near the end that will make you weep. Jeffers is a mastermind.)