READING LIST: LATE NIGHTS ON AIR

This may sound a bit strange to say but, looking back on my childhood, one of the things that I remember most…is the radio!  Radio played a far more prominent role in our house than television ever did and I kind of feel like I grew up listening to the radio!

My uncle – who also happens to be one of my most favourite people in the entire world – used to work at a radio station in the same city that I grew up in.  He was a producer and spent most of his time behind the scenes, but nonetheless, I knew that he was there and in turn, I used to listen to radio station at every opportunity.  On the odd occasion, my mom would let me go visit with him at the station when he was working overnights.  I used to love being there, late at night, among the otherwise abandoned hallways of the station while my uncle somehow spread music across the airwaves to anyone and everyone out there that was still awake and listening.

I became attached to their morning show hosts as I woke up each day to them on my alarm clock radio, sometimes feeling like I was just one more friend participating in their daily little banter.  Each winter, I would silently beg them from the comfort of my bed to announce a snow day or the cancellation of my school bus {it never happened} and as our morning took on its natural rhythm in our house, the radio was always playing.

As I got older, late night radio became my favourite company.  I would often spend many nights awake in my dorm room working on papers or going through textbooks and it was always comforting to me to hear the voices of other people piercing through the blackness.

I suppose that it shouldn’t have come as a huge surprise then when the first great love of my life turned out to be a radio producer that I met in my second year of university!  A few weeks after we first met, he called me up a little after midnight to ask if I was listening to his station.  When he pleasantly discovered that I was, he proceeded to ask me if there was anything in particular that I wanted to listen to…and from there, we spent the next three hours on the phone choosing the playlist that would resonate through the late night hours of our city.  It was one of the best fourth dates ever!

Long into my adult years, as the night hawk in me stayed strong and healthy, late night radio just became a staple in my life…a constant in my ever changing world.  But when our son came along, late nights – in and of themselves – became non-existent!  There was all nights but never just casual late nights, which in my mind, is what’s needed to fully appreciate radio.  So now, we join in the conversation in the mornings as were getting ready for the day to begin or driving around the city tackling our to-do list.  But late night radio has become like a passionate lover long left behind…at least for now!

Which brings me to Elizabeth Hay’s beautiful novel Late Nights on Air…one of my latest reads and now cherished treasures.  The 2007 Scotiabank Giller Prize Winner is about just that…late nights on air, and immediately brought me back to the days when midnight to three a.m. was my time slot of choice.  I loved every page of it…every character in it…every memory that came bubbling to the surface because of it.  It reminded me of just how much I love radio and the invisible relationships that are created through it.  Even better still, while this novel takes place primarily in the North, you can actually find yourself among the streets of Ottawa through various chapters…an indulgence that I have yet to ever get tired of!

I highly recommend it, not only because we need to support Canadian writing whenever possible, but because its beautiful, brilliant and haunting…it’s everything a great read should be!