Julia is well read.

Julia Pohl-Miranda has more jobs than you. When she’s not writing about food for Nightlife or doing “mysterious, vague internet consulting and marketing work,” she can be found behind the counter at Montreal’s most charming bookstore where she makes great book recommendations and expertly encourages irresponsible impulse buys. I’m going to let the photos of Julia-as-Snufkin speak for themselves.

What kind of a reader are you?
I read in fits and starts. I used to be a voracious reader, and then I got busy. Nowadays there will be a day where I’ll read two graphic novels and 100 pages of a novel, and then a week of only-reading-before-bed-for-two-pages and then a week where I read three novels and then I’ll bog down on the fourth for a month. Generally speaking though, usually modern fiction (stories, plays, graphic novels), with some nonfiction (usually creative nonfiction) thrown in.

How has working at Drawn & Quarterly affected your reading habits?
It’s unclear if this is entirely because of D+Q (or because of my Lit degree), but I am awful at finishing a book I don’t like. Since we’re encouraged to read books as they come in to the shop, if a book doesn’t grab me and something else catches my eye…. well…

Also, I can definitively say that thanks to D+Q, I read a lot more graphic novels than I would otherwise read, and I have read the first twenty pages of countless books.

You were my go-to girl for book recommendations when I lived in Montreal. How do you go about suggesting books to customers?
There are a few things people always want recommendations of: comics set in Montreal (The Hipless Boy and Michel Rabagliati’s Paul series), comics by Montreal authors (those two again, but also Matt Forsythe and Julie Doucet and I like to include Marc Bell and Amy Lockhart for having lived in Montreal), and must-have comics (which my go-to, as for you, is Fun Home or Asterios Polyp and of course Maus and I love the Moomin books, and I love but accept that no one except me and one or two other lit-comics fans wants to read Masterpiece Comics).

I guess I listen for keywords in what people tell me they’re looking for, and I try to provide a diverse selection both in content (fiction, autobio, more alternative [i.e. more punk-rock/sexy/Japanese], more popular, harder to find) and drawing styles.

Usually though, the tough cases are where they already have an idea of the book they want, and either it doesn’t exist, or we don’t have it (I once had someone come in looking for a French-language comic set in Quebec whose subject was food, and I was able to find a Quebecois comic about food using Google, but we didn’t have it in stock).

What book have you reread more than any other and why?
Oh gosh, that’s tough. Probably The Diary of Anne Frank or one of L.M. Montgomery‘s books or one of Madeleine L’Engle‘s books or something. When I was reading those books I was at the upper limit of YA fiction but not ready for adult content because I was only in grade 5 and so I stagnated for a bit and re-read a lot, but I don’t know if I have reread much since elementary school.

My relationship with books changes so much over even short periods of time that I am hesitant to re-read much, because I worry that when I go back, it won’t hold the same emotional power as the first time I read it.

Tell me about the last book you couldn’t put down.
We’ve been hyping up Sheila Heti’s new book How Should a Person Be? at the Librairie, and it sort of goes hand-in-hand with I Love Dick, which is an epistolary novel/feminist art critique/cultural theory tome. They’re both utterly indescribable and I devoured them both recently. I’ve been trying to improve my ability to talk about books, so here goes:

I read I Love Dick and How Should a Person Be? within a month of each other. Both are genre-crossing works that play with what it means to be producing fiction and how cultural criticism and philosophy interact with fiction/art.

I Love Dick is an epistolary novel that explores the sorts of relationships women have with men, but also the role of feminism in those interactions, and the boy’s club that the arts world generally is. It does all of that in a really playful and engaging way, which is simultaneously intellectually stimulating and intensely readable.

The first half of the book is the explicitly epistolary part: Chris Kraus (the author)’s becomes infatuated with a colleague of her husband’s, a cultural critic named Dick. She and her husband Sylvere write over 100 pages of letters to Dick. The second half of the novel examines her relationship with her husband and discusses her life leading up to and during the time that she is in love with Dick, but I would say that the most interesting stuff is the discussion of how men and women interact in the arts world, and the creation of a canon of feminist art (and what gets left out of that canon).

While I would summarize I Love Dick as fiction and feminist cultural theory and feminist theory, I would summarize How Should a Person Be? as fiction and philosophical treatise and art criticism.

HSAPB? takes the life of Sheila Heti and fictionalizes it to examine what it means to be producing art in the 21st century, what beauty is, and how to live in a beautiful or perfect way. Sheila Heti has always been able to string a sentence together that can break your heart, and this book takes you to the lows and the highs of producing art, of disappointing other people, and of being alive. And saying all that, I feel like I haven’t done it justice, so let me add this: the way she thinks about the world is special. From a Torontoist interview:

I think the nice thing about depicting one’s friends is you have to make a real attempt to understand the parts of them that make them different from other people,” Heti says. “It’s so hard to describe people, because it’s a problem of adjectives. Adjectives tell you how a thing is like other things (this thing is green like other green things, or kind like other kind things), but when you want to convey a person, what you’re trying to get at it is what makes them different from other people.

I guess that was cheating a little bit, but oh well!

Tell me about your favourite place to read.
I love reading on the bus. I am actually sort of angry at Megabus for installing WiFi on all its buses, because the drive between Toronto and Montreal is long enough that I always get around to reading a few hundred pages while I’m on the bus, no matter how many hours I waste listening to podcasts, napping, or planning my Tim Hortons lunch. I’ve been really busy for the last few months, so I find that the place where I am best able to focus and stop creating a list of all the things I should be doing other than reading is the bus, but really anywhere that has no internet is great.

What makes you pick up a book you’ve never heard of?
I definitely do judge a book by its cover, but that alone will not prevent me from reading a book. I’ll still check it out if the back blurb is good or it has good quotes (viz.: Jacob Kaufman’s All My Friends Are Superheroes: http://www.chbooks.com/catalogue/all-my-friends-are-superheroes [did i just use two colons in a row and then COMPOUND THE PROBLEM WITH A BRACKET INSIDE A PARENTHESIS?? I think I did!]).

Testimonials (from customers, from coworkers, from acquaintances) will get me to read a book 99% of the time, and to stick it out through long unpleasant reads.

Julia’s Must Reads
This is also hard, because like I said, I have these loves for books that I read at a certain time in my life and I don’t know if anyone (even myself) would connect to them as closely as I did that first time when I was 10 or 15 or 20. Also, a lot of the books that mean the most to me are really personally relevant or I read them at very specific moments in my life.

So here are a few that are must-reads for Julia (which you are all encouraged to read, but I cannot be blamed if you don’t connect thoroughly to it):
The Middle Stories by Sheila Heti
Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
Pnin by Vladimir Nabakov
The Truth About Stories by Thomas King

And here are a few that I think anyone can and should read:
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem
The Restless Supermarket by Ivan Vladislavic
Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson
What is the What by Dave Eggers

[I'm pissed off that the latter is a list of all men authors (and sort of all white men unless you count Valentino Achak Deng), but all of my books are in boxes and I cannot visualize the contents of said boxes, so this is what comes to mind. Also, I've noticed that I can only really keep awe for two or three books in my head at any given time, just like I can only think of two or three restaurants or two or three bands that I listen to.]