Sens at Land’s End

I have a new project for myself: reading hockey books. I no longer remember how exactly I thought of starting this project, but I think it probably had to do with the fact that I’ve been listening to The Tragically Hip a lot lately, which got me thinking about songs that reference hockey. From there, I started wondering about books — specifically novels, because I’m not a great reader of non-fiction — that involve the best game you can name in some way. I first thought of Roch Carrier’s excellent picture book The Hockey Sweater (and the great National Film Board animated version of it), and then remembered a novel I’d read while doing my first English degree called Black Madonna, by F.G. Paci. Though that one isn’t technically about hockey, one of the main characters plays hockey, and the game is used in the book as a metaphor for Canadianness, eh?

I started browsing around websites looking for more and found that there are quite a few works of fiction and poetry about the game. I stumbled upon Paul Martin’s blog (Not that Paul Martin. No, not that Paul Martin either.), which led me to the Canadian Lit website Northwest Passages’ Hockey Lit section. I was intrigued. Since I am, at the moment, working at an institution which holds at least two copies of every single book ever published by a Canadian writer or about a Canadian subject, and am also armed with a library card which allows me to borrow any book my heart desires from said massive collection, this seemed like an ideal moment to start investigating further.

So today at lunch I did a keyword search for “hockey” in the library catalogue and came up with almost 3000 results. When I copied my search results into Word, it made a document of 272 pages that crashed the program when I tried to edit it. (I thought about printing it, but we have a communal printer and I think other people might have documents they’d like to print off sometime this week.) They really do have everything here — from every single edition of Ken Dryden’s The Game ever published to guides to buying hockey equipment, manuals about getting your certification as a referee in the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association, and cookbooks published by NHL teams in the 1980s (Flaming Foods: A Cookbook of Enjoyable Recipes By Your Calgary Flames Families). It’s kind of awesome.

Before I raid the library’s holdings, I’m going to get this project started with King Leary by Paul Quarrington, which I bought a long time ago (I have a tendency to buy a book and then not read it for about three years) and had brought home with me to read over the summer. I will try to keep reading, and will post my thoughts on the books I read here. Eventually, I hope to build a list of hockey fiction, which can serve as a resource to hockey fanatics, and help to fan the flames of hockey obsession during the offseason.