Joel Plaskett shares 4 book collections that he picks up again and again
The East Coast musician's new single Rainy Day Janey is out now
Nova Scotia musician and songwriter Joel Plaskett has always been a book lover and he approaches his love of reading the same way he does music — by going all in.
Once he gets into a specific writer, he reads all of their work, he told CBC Books in an interview. Plus he also owns a bookstore called Friction Books in Dartmouth, N.S.
The Juno Award-winning musician's latest single, Rainy Day Janey, is out now. And with a new album on the way, Plaskett is pretty busy. To make time for reading, he resorts to slimmer volumes with short sections that he can briefly dive into as he travels and tours.
To celebrate the single release, he shared his favourite collections that he keeps by his bedside.
Ninety-Nine Stories of God by Joy Williams
Ninety-Nine Stories of God is a collection of 99 vignettes that explore the human relationship to an ever-elusive God.
"There's this dream-like quality to it," said Plaskett, also appreciating its brevity and humour.
But it's the fact that he doesn't quite understand every vignette that keeps him coming back to the book time and time again.
There's this dream-like quality to it.- Joel Plaskett
"I feel like there's stuff in her writing that's going to make sense to me in 10 years. But even just reading it now, it's just really rich."
House of Sugar by Rebecca Kraatz
House of Sugar is a book of graphic panels that's very close to Plaskett's heart — it's created by his wife, Rebecca Kraatz. It's an amalgamation of two year's worth of comic strips for Halifax's The Coast Weekly, featuring many autobiographical anecdotes about a childhood in the prairies and on the West Coast.
"Her drawings are really great. But Rebecca's writing is exceptional too because she has a great sense of humour," said Plaskett.
"She has a way of telling stories that's so effective. She writes in the way that she grew up speaking — and you can just really sense her point of view in it."
Road-side Dog by Czeslaw Miłosz, translated by Robert Hass
Road-side Dog is a 1999 poetry collection that encapsulates the end of a century through the eyes of a Nobel Prize-winning Polish-American writer who lived through both World Wars.
"There's something of having been through all that sort of existential crisis: the deep dive of philosophy and the reckoning with the postmodern condition. [There's] the kind of meaninglessness of everything that's painted on — and he's kind of pushing back against that in this really powerful way," said Plaskett.
I just find it inviting.- Joel Plaskett
"But he's a nuanced enough thinker that he's playing with all these references, many of which that I don't fully know. But I just find it inviting."
Seek by Denis Johnson
One of Plaskett's favourite writers is Denis Johnson. Though primarily a novelist and poet, the late Johnson dipped into nonfiction in Seek, a collection of essays and articles that follow his travels around the world.
"I love how he writes about people on the fringes," said Plaskett. "He writes about these disheveled and marginalized folks — or just people whose inner life is falling apart."
"There's something quite fearless about the way he writes that continues to surprise me."
LISTEN | Rainy Day Janey by Joel Plaskett:
