The House of All Sorts

Emily Carr seems to have liked animals much more than people, and this book is about how horrible people are and how wonderful dogs are. I first bought this book years ago because I enjoyed reading Klee Wyck for a class, and I probably would have liked this more had I read it back then. But I lean more toward compassion and understanding than I used to, so it was difficult to enjoy this.

However, her style of writing can be quite refreshing, and there were a couple of memorable passages:

“Poetical extravagance over ‘pearly dew and daybreak' does not ring true when that most infernal of inventions, the alarm clock, wrenches you from sleep, rips a startled heart from your middle and tosses it on to an angry tongue, to make ugly splutterings not complimentary to the new morning; down upon you spills cold shiveriness – a new day's responsibilities have come.”

“People in the house moved quietly. Human voices were tuned so low that the voices in inanimate things – shutting of doors, clicks of light switches, crackling of fires – swelled to importance. Clocks ticked off the solemn moments as loudly as their works would let them.”