January 5, 2026

What I Read on my Winter Vacation

Holiday break! This year I only read books by British lady writers whose pub dates span most of the 20th century. It was a pleasure!

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark: I’ve been reading a lot of Muriel Spark in the last while, and welcomed the opportunity to finally reread The Prime…, which I initially encountered in a first year university English class, and almost all of it went over my head. Muriel Spark’s work is strange, sly, and sneaky, and this slim volume is especially subtle. In all her work, there is also a religious element I don’t fully understand, so I’m always a bit unmoored when I’m reading her, but this time I was grateful to easily have a better understanding of the book. While it’s very much about girlhood, the novel’s scope is very broad and I think I personally had to be older to really understand it. It’s also funny, and brutally devastating in a vicious yet understated way that is easy to gloss over if one is not paying attention—I really wasn’t back then, or just didn’t have the right kind of antennae.

Offshore, by Penelope Fitzgerald: I have a complicated relationship with P. Fitzgerald, whose novels were off-putting upon my first encounters, and in some ways they continue to be so—I don’t read her as easily as I do other English writers. Her perspectives and framings are always just a little “off” from what I’m expecting, and there is a strangeness too that’s a little akin to Spark. But so many people I admire love her AND her books are short enough that they’re easy to reconsider, and so I’ve done so, and read them all, connecting with her through this challenge. I also connected via her wonderful biography, by Hermione Lee, which I loved—her own story is fascinating. Anyway, in December I read the novel Fonseca, by Jessica Francis Kane, a fictional telling of an experience Fitzgerald had in Mexico in 1952, and while I liked it, but didn’t love it (it was strange and a bit obscure in the same way I find Fitzgerald’s work, probably deliberately so), it did put me in the mood to reread some of her work, so I picked Offshore, set in the 1960s, about a motley crew of variously desperate people living on London canal boats—something Fitzgerald knew about, as she’d spent time raising her own children on a canal boat during some of many lean years, a situation which finally ended when the boat sunk and landed at the bottom of the Thames.

The Rector’s Wife, by Joanna Trollope: It was at this point that the themes of my winter reading became clearer—I was going to be reading about rectors, vicars, and curates well into the new year (and Bishops too!). Even Offshore had an interfering Priest, although he didn’t have a lot of impact. Also Joanna Trollope had died earlier in December, and so it was time to finally read this novel which I stole from a rental cottage the summer before last, drawn by its Pym appeal. It was very fun and rich, the story of a middle-aged woman who has delayed her own chances and dreams in order to serve her husband’s interest as a rector in a rural English community. But when he fails to get the promotion he’d been hoping for, she finally takes matters into her own hands, getting a job stocking shelves in a grocery store in order to finance their troubled youngest child’s private schooling—although it’s also more than that, setting off a cascade of events that change everything.

A Game of Hide and Seek, by Elizabeth Taylor: I don’t really have a sense of Elizabeth Taylor (the other one, who did not have violet eyes), but every time I read her, I’m surprised by her talent, and glad that I did. This one is about Harriet, the unremarkable daughter of a suffragette whose quiet life is disturbed when she falls in love with Vesey, the nephew of her mother’s friend, the flame he lights in her heart enduring even after the two are parted (they were barely together) and she finds respectability in marriage to an older man. Which means that when Vesey reappears in her life decades later, she can’t help but act on her feelings and the attraction between them, even at the risk of upsetting everything in her careful life. There’s a lot of humour in this one too (the shop where Harriet works where wages are so low that the employees feel justified spending their workdays taking care of personal needs, like doing their ironing, or waxing their upper lips). Richly textured, and full of such understated feeling, I enjoyed this one a lot.

A Few Green Leaves, by Barbara Pym: The Barbara Pym read odyssey continues, and I loved this one, her final novel, released posthumously. Pym’s novels are either set in London, or in rural villages, this one being the latter, in which a 30-something anthropologist moves into a cottage and becomes swept up in community affairs, and possibly an attraction to the widowed rector who is much occupied by local history. It’s very much about the passage of time, and there are mentions of characters from Pym’s previous novels—the formidable Esther Clovis, in particular—having died. I think this would be a weird, albeit still enjoyable, novel to pick up and start reading out of the blue, but in the context of Pym’s oeuvre, it’s very poignant and lovely.

The Little Girls, by Elizabeth Bowen: Bowen is another writer I sometimes struggle with. I’ve really enjoyed some of her novels, but found others really hard-going, almost as though they were a deliberate running of circles around their points. This one was also a little bit hard to understand, and very odd—it was her second-last novel and perhaps not wholly representative of her body of work. It was fiercely funny in places—an eccentric widow places ads in all national newspapers in order to locate two old friends with whom she’d partaken in a pact during their school days just before WW1, but also there are parts where I’m still not sure what actually happened, the story so thoroughly obfuscated, a little too much going on. It was not my favourite

The Knox Brothers, by Penelope Fitzgerald: The one book in this stack that’s not a novel, but it’s by a novelist, so it counts? I happened upon this secondhand copy of Fitzgerald’s biography of her father and uncles, and wasn’t quite sure how much I’d be interested in these men’s stories, but it turned out to be A LOT. The Knox brothers were the sons of the Bishop of Manchester and the daughter of the Bishop of Lahore, four out of six children, and were remarkable every one. The one who grew to be Penelope Fitzgerald’s father became the editor of Punch Magazine, another was a famous cryptologist in both world wars, the other two both were priests, one of whom ended up converting to Catholicism (and FINALLY this book gave me the context for the Anglo-Catholic questions that come up again and again in Barbara Pym novels where priests are continually “going over to Rome” or being suspected as such). Even more remarkable than their accomplishments and eccentricities, Fitzgerald underlines how her father and his brothers were kind and loving men, feeling people in a time where men of their class were not commonly thought to have such emotional capacity. I loved this one.

Family and Friends, by Anita Brookner: And I loved this one too, though I was wary. Some of Brookner’s novels are incredible dense, opaque, and more cerebral than anything else, but this one (which followed her Booker-winning Hotel Du Lac in 1984) seems to be the exception to the rule. Not cerebral in the slightest, it begins with a family photograph and glosses across the surface of that family’s history across decades as things are ever-changing and nothing ever quite unfolding as expected. Fast, sweeping, and engaging, this turns into a remarkable portrait of seemingly ordinary people, highlighting the less flattering aspects of its characters. Playful and surprising, this one as a pleasure.

Whose Body, by Dorothy L. Sayers: I wasn’t planning on reading Sayers, except then I watched Wake Up, Dead Man, the new “Knives Out” movie, and this novel is referenced (and also Penelope Fitzgerald’s priest uncle Ronnie Knox was also a detective novelist and contemporary of Sayers—they were both members of The Detection Club, along with Agatha Christie, and others). I came to Sayers and Peter Wimsey via Harriet Vane, and was sort of uninterested in reading any of Sayers books in which Vane doesn’t feature (which was most of them) but getting to know Wimsey and his vulnerabilities (he’s suffering from shell shock in the early ’20s; his mother admits it might be too much to ask someone to get over a war in just a year or two) was fascinating. The mystery was satisfying and not too convoluted, although the antisemitism was unpalatable, though at least it was mostly displayed by the novels villains, but still.

The Life of Violet, by Virginia Woolf: This little book is a collection of three short stories written by Woolf when she was still Virginia Stephen, back in 1908. This work had previously been regarded as unimportant, but then a polished draft was discovered, resulting in this publication of these three fables inspired by the life of Woolf’s friend Violet Dickinson. Dreamy, funny, and whimsical, the stories are also remarkable for how they feature elements that would continue to preoccupy Woolf’s creative work—biography, rooms of one’s own, the lives of women—for the rest of her career.

An Unsuitable Attachment, by Barbara Pym: My Pym reread is nearly complete! This was an earlier Pym novel that remained unpublished until after her death, and lacks the (even unplumbed) depth of her later work, but is still very charming, and it was kind of amazing to read back into the past in order to see Esther Clovis resurrected!! This is one of Pym’s urban London parish books, complete with a sojourn to Rome. There is a librarian, a pampered cat, a lugubrious vicar’s wife, chicken in aspic, an anthropologist, and a bedraggled beatnik—what more could a reader want?

Pack of Cards, by Penelope Lively: And I am so THRILLED to be loving this book as much I am, because it’s a pretty big commitment—more than 30 stories by Penelope Lively published in one volume in North America after her Booker win for Moon Tiger in 1987. (It includes the contents of her first two story collections and nine new stories). Fortunately, the stories are wonderful, and I’m gobbling them up—I’m nearly two thirds through now. I don’t think I’ve ever read her short fiction before, but it’s just reminded of what a wonderful writer she is, and now I want to reread the huge stack of her novels that I own, most of which I’ve not read in years.

August 25, 2025

More Summer Reading

If someone wrote a book about MY summer, it would be awfully boring to read about—all glory, no drama—but oh how lovely it’s been to experience. Last week we spent another beautiful holiday lakeside, and there was so much time for everything—being a little bit bored, even. We watched a movie every day and one day even watched two (Jaws and Puss in Boots—an incongruous mix but the latter was a nice palate cleanser). And of course, there was reading.

I started off with THE HOMEMADE GOD, which is the first book I’ve ever read by Rachel Joyce, and while it didn’t blow my mind, I enjoyed it, and the depiction of the lake in particular (and swimming) made this a very good book with which to kick off my holiday, even though my lake was in Haliburton instead of Italy. It’s the story of four adult siblings from London whose lives have been defined by their father, a middle-brow but very famous artist, and how their messy arrangements and understandings are turned upside down when he marries an enigmatic woman in her 20s, and then winds up dead at his Italian villa not long after, and his purported final painting is nowhere to be found.

Next, I read THE UPSTAIRS HOUSE, by Julia Fine, which came into my life in the most beautiful way. I happened to be in a bookshop a few weeks ago and picked up this book for absolutely no reason at all, and ITS PREMISE WAS A POSTPARTUM WOMAN WHOSE HOUSE IS HAUNTED BY THE GHOST OF MARGARET WISE BROWN. I mean, WHAT?? Could there BE a more perfect premise for a book? And how did I never hear about it, and can you imagine if I’d never picked up that book at all and shared a timeline with a novel about a postpartum woman whose house is haunted by the ghost of Margaret Wise Brown and never ever read it? I cannot imagine a greater tragedy. Even better, the book was WONDERFUL, dark and literary, about an academic whose thesis on Margaret Wise Brown and her influence by modernists like Gertrude Stein is put on hold by the birth of her first child, and things get weird after that, the novel itself haunted by Good Night Moon (itself a ghost story, if you read carefully) and The Runaway Bunny, and like any good writer herself influenced by Margaret Wise Brown, Fine resists an ending that doesn’t unsettle somewhat. This book was terrific.

And then I picked up REAL TIGERS, by Mick Herron, the third novel in his Slow Horses series, which I’m really enjoying (and it’s been reported to me by reputable sources that the TV show is even better than the book!). The series subverts spy tropes (among many tropes) and is so interesting for that, though sometimes the narrative gets very in the weeds and I’m a bit lost, which doesn’t bother me so very much (this is the case for me and any spy or mystery novel, to be honest). Anyway, I’m a fan and will keep reading—though my husband is two books ahead of me and maybe read too many at once, and suggests I space them out a bit, because it’s possible to have too much of a good thing.

And then GOD HELP THE CHILD, by Toni Morrison, which kind of cemented the theme of moral ambiguity in my reading list, as all of Morrison’s works do, blurring firm lines adhered to by people who are too fond of certainty. It’s the story of Bride, born to a mother who is shocked by the blackness in the hue of her skin, and brings her up with emotional deprivation to train her for a world that is going to be hard on her, another novel that subverts the readers understanding of good and evil (that last line! Absolutely haunting…) and maybe this is the first time a reviewer has compared Toni Morrison with the Slow Horses books, but both are utterly uninterested in making their readers comfortable or confirming anything.

And then I read MS. DEMEANOR, by Elinor Lipman, whom I’ve never read before, but I found this one in a booksale earlier this year and have been saving it for a holiday. Unlike THE UPSTAIRS HOUSE, this is a not a novel whose central appeal lies in its premise, if only because the narrative is all over the place (which is kind of ironic for a story about house arrest). It’s about a woman who gets caught having sex with a junior colleague on the rooftop deck of her Manhattan apartment, subsequently losing her job and being sentenced to six months of house arrest, but it’s also about love, Polish aristocrats, 19th century cookbooks, twins and sisterhood, and the possibilities for redemption. I devoured it, and it reminded me of Laurie Colwin, which is the highest literary praise I know how to deliver.

Next up was THE BOARDING HOUSE, by William Trevor, whose novels have been a summer staple of mine ever since I bought a used copy of his 1971 novel MISS GOMEZ AND THE BRETHREN for 10 cents in the Presquille Provincial Park park store. His works are so wicked and irreverent, his earlier books in particular, a bit of a Muriel Spark presence of the devil sensibility (Toni Morrison would concur). This 1965 novel was his third book, the story of a ragtag group of tenants in a London boarding house whose plans go awry when the owner of the house suddenly dies and his will leaves two very incompatible tenants in charge of everything—a surefire recipe for chaos, which transpires. My one reservation about this book was the single character of colour, a Nigerian man called Mr. Obd, who is not gifted the same complexity as his fellow characters, who is rendered simple and childlike (and his physical features drawn in racist terms). It made me think a lot because ALL the characters in this book were hideously flawed, so in a way Trevor’s portrayal is a kind of equality, but Obd doesn’t get to be human in the same way, is a collection of cliches (and also the novel’s ending doesn’t serve him). This is not a reason to not read this book, which is such a wickedly good one, but it’s definitely grounds for thoughtful critique (and this is a problem I find it almost any British novel from its time which acknowledged that Black people even existed).

And then the sweet treat of a book by Mhairi McFarlane, who is one of my favourite romance novelists, her books having a wonderful complexity and depth of character. Between Us was published in 2023, the story of a school teacher whose writer boyfriend’s TV series has been enormously successful, and she wonders if this is part of the reason why their relationship feels stale, or if it would have happened anyway after a decade together. And then she watches the pilot of his new show and discovers painful details from her personal life have been included in the story, and other details make her wonder if she really ever knew him at all—but also a break-up would destroy their longtime friend group and she might be left with nothing. All of which is complicated when she’s called back to her hometown to help out in her mother’s pub, stirring up the same memories provoked by what she’d seen in the show, and making her face things she’s been hiding from since her childhood.

Followed by WE ARE LIGHT, by Gerda Blees, which I bought on impulse at a bookshop in Bancroft while we were away, and it’s a fascinating book, translated from the Dutch by Michele Hutchison, based on a true story about a commune whose members attempt to live on light and air, foregoing food, which leads to one member’s death, which is where the book begins, and the narrative uses the language of the commune of collectivity and oneness to tell a story where each chapter begins with “We are ——”, beginning with “We are night” and concluding with “We are light,” the story told from that precise point of view (which includes that of a pen, a pair of socks, the scent of oranges, the neighbours, the dead woman’s family, the detective investigating whose own daughter is suffering with anorexia which gives her work a personal edge). There is a whimsical element to the approach, but the care and precision of the perspective means there is nothing “light” about it. This is a novel about truth, understanding, perspectives, meaning-making, and also connection, the necessity of the WE (but also it’s limits). Did I buy this book because the cover fit into the very orange palette of most of my reading (DAMN YOU, MICK HERRON.) Perhaps I did, but I’m so glad I did. This was an illuminating and surprising read, and a reminder that reading off the beaten track is so often incredibly rewarding.

And my ninth book was THE MYSTERIOUS AFFAIR AT STYLES, by Agatha Christie, our audiobook for the car journey, which (as usual, being no Poirot) I was completely confused by before the big reveal, but I enjoyed the ride all the same.

July 29, 2025

Summer Goodness

Last weekend we went away again, and I brought along Liz Moore’s 2020 novel LONG BRIGHT RIVER on a camping trip out of nostalgia for the weekend I spent last summer utterly absorbed in Moore’s GOD OF THE WOODS at the same park, and it was no surprise just how much it delivered because my husband and teen had already read the book before me and both of them loved it. And I did too (I’ve heard it said that it might be better than GOD OF THE WOODS, which I think is true, although GOD… subverted my expectations in the most interesting ways and this novel was a little more conventional). It’s the story of Mickey a police officer in Philadelphia’s gritty Kensington neighbourhood who lives in fear of one day coming upon the body of her sister, Kacey, a longtime addict, on one of her patrols, and for whom the line between her professional and personal lives become blurred when it appears that a serial killer is targeting vulnerable women in the neighbourhood. It’s a gripping mystery with all kinds of twists, but also a searing indictment of police corruption and incredible human cost of current drug crises, including opioid addiction and drug poisonings.

July 23, 2025

Last Week’s Summer Reads

Once again, summer reads stacked up like a dream, this time on last week’s trip to the Lanaudiere region of Quebec, where we fell in love with the cleanest lake, shared a lawn with a fat groundhog, went swimming every day, and had fires almost every evening in the company of wonderful friends, the very best time. And the books were just as book, eclectic, fun, sparkling and magical.

I began with Jess Walter’s SO FAR GONE, which I picked up at Spark Books in Perth en-route (actually on the recommendation of David Worsley from Words Worth Books in Waterloo). I read and adored Walter’s BEAUTIFUL RUINS on a summer holiday years ago, and this very different kind of story proved just as rich and satisfying. It’s about a man who has retreated to a secluded property in Washington State after his long career in journalism fizzled out with the industry and after he punched his conspiracy nut son-in-law in the face during Thanksgiving in 2016. And then all these years, there are two children on his doorstep whom he fails to recognize as his grandchildren, and SO FAR GONE is the story of his wobbly redemption as he is forced to return to to the world and save his grandkids from the dangerous militia their dad has become embroiled with. Funny, thoughtful, twisty, and absorbing, this one is definitely a highlight of the summer.

Next up I read KAKIGORI SUMMER, by Emily Itami (who is Japanese, but writes in English, and whose text engages with Japanese kanji in the most interesting way), which I bought at Words Worth in Waterloo the week before, and which is going to be a highlight of the year. I’d previously read Itami’s novel FAULT LINES, and liked it very much, but this one is even better, the story of three Japanese sisters (their mother is dead, their father is barely known to them, living with a new family in his native England) whose lives are far apart but who come together again when the youngest—a pop star—becomes embroiled in a national scandal. Together, along with the middle sister’s young son, they all return to their childhood home, and the company of their prickly great grandmother, and are forced to make sense of their history, the possibilities for their future, all the promises of a beautiful, imperfect world, and the fragility of life itself.

I read Mick Herron’s DEAD LIONS after that, the second book in the SLOW HORSES series. I’ve not seen the TV show, but am enjoying the books a lot, and my husband who is two books ahead of me claims that the series continues to be great. It’s a spy thriller that subverts expectations at every turn, such a fresh take on a familiar genre, so that it continues to be cozy and surprising at once, and also so prescient—this one’s about the Russian threat lying dormant after the fall of the USSR and just waiting to spring up again.

And then I read THREE SUMMERS, by Margarita Liberaki, a recommendation with Teri Vlassopoulos via Julia Zarankin, an English translation of a Greek classic published in 1946, another book about three sisters coming of age in a bucolic idyll that feels worlds away from where Greece actually was at the time of publication. Dreamlike, steeped in heat and atmosphere, the story is strange and surprising, secrets and hidden strengths and weaknesses revealed, the story itself ever changing amidst a world where so much stays the same.

Next up was LANDLINES, by Rainbow Rowell, which came out in 2014 and I recall readers feeling let down by, and so I didn’t have any expectations. I fell in love with Rowell’s work when I finally read ATTACHMENTS, and then ELEANOR & PARK, and her most recent books, SLOW DANCE (which I loved SO MUCH). Perhaps fans of her super-hit FAN GIRL weren’t as interesting in LANDLINES, a time-bending story about a long marriage, and motherhood, the middle-agedness of it all, but that’s what SLOW DANCE is all about, and it’s right up my street. I loved it, and now keep listening to “Leather and Lace” and not even ironically.

And then finally, HERE ONE MOMENT, by Liane Moriarty, whose books I LOVE, but I didn’t rush after this one when it came out because the premise was so odd (it’s about a plane full of people to whom a mysterious passenger delivers each of their precise dates and causes of death) and PREMISEY. I didn’t love Moriarty’s novel NINE PERFECT STRANGERS, and while I appreciate her urge to spread her creative wings and not simply rewrite BIG LITTLE LIES over and over, I felt her latest might be more of the same. But it really surprised me, and I enjoyed it so much, especially Moriarty’s beautiful talent for investing difficult characters with the most human and sympathetic edges. The story had me GRIPPED, but I had to put it down unfinished on our last night away, and throughout the six hour drive home, I was so looking forward to finally getting to the end, the most delicious anticipation.

January 6, 2025

SPACE

Our Christmas tree was wonderful, lush and redolent until (almost) the very end, and once it was gone, we had so much space it was almost like getting a new room, and so we tidied it. Too many books, as always, so I got rid of a lot of them, and then freed up an entire shelf by relocating my encyclopedia set (circa 1987, Berlin Wall forever) to a space on top of another bookcase that had previously been occupied by crap and clutter. Which means SPACE, my books with room to breathe, my personal library with room to grow. And speaking of SPACE, here is ORBITAL, by Samantha Harvey, which (I will confess!) I was not much looking forward to reading because I’d read her previous novel DEAR THIEF—pitched as a fabulous novel that not enough people were reading, a mark of the state of publishing together—and I didn’t like it at all, perhaps because I don’t actually know the song “Famous Blue Raincoat” on which the novel is cleverly based. So when ORBITAL won the Booker Prize, I didn’t rush out and buy it, but requested it from the library instead, finally sitting down to read it over the holidays, and IT WAS SO GOOD. Yes, it’s me, as ever, with the least hot takes, but I adored this book, which is set on the international space station over the course of a single earth-day, and it really was a love song to our planet and to people and the possibilities when we choose to be our better selves. The image that has stuck on my mind is the floating astronauts at the window watching the earth down below, Harvey giving us the whiteness on the bottom of their very clean socks, which is a perspective I’d never even started to imagine. When I was finished reading, I pushed it onto my teen, who read it in an evening, and then her dad read it too, and we had to buy our own copy because we all loved it so much—and with the relocated encyclopedia there is even room to shelf it now. And I barely know about controversy the book was embroiled in either (it was targeted with bad reviews on Goodreads for supposedly glorifying Russia [um, it definitely does not]) because I’ve spent very little time on social media in the past month, which I’m not sorry about at all, a choice that has freed up mental SPACE for me to read and think and be, and I’m going to carry all that with me into a hopefully spacious new year.

September 3, 2024

The Summer Was An Envelope

The summer was an envelope

packed with photographs

ticket stubs

and ice cream cone wrappers

that say JOY

Waterlogged and gritty

with beach sparkle

smells like sunscreen

Moments to memories

A sacred container

Most precious souvenir

August 16, 2024

Good Time

Am I having a good time because the books are so good, or are the books so good because I’m having a good time?

The proverbial question, one that seems more pressing when I’m in a funk and the books are terrible, but it’s worth asking too when I just keep opening one fantastic novel after another. And it’s true that our summer has been quite glorious, last week ending a string of four delightful getaways around Ontario, each one with reading as sparkling as the lakes were. A month ago, I was raving to you about Catherine Newman’s Sandwich, a read that felt like the springboard to my summer, and now I’m back with another pick that read its way straight into my heart, so much so that I’m imploring everybody around me to read it, read it, read it. (So far, my husband and daughter have done so, and loved it too, along with Barack Obama, so I’m currently working on a 100% approval rating.)

I read Liz Moore’s novel God of the Woods during a camping trip to Pinery Provincial Park on Lake Huron, and I thought I knew what I was getting into. I’ve read books about missing girls before, you see, and I’ve read books set at summer camps, and I know how such a setting can be both creepy AND perfect for exploring class divides, and this is also a book about a great house belonging to a wealthy family—naturally the house has a name, and that name is, absurdly, “Self-Reliance.” I’ve read detective fiction before too—the detective working the case of the missing Barbara Van Laar in this book is a young woman eager to prove herself, whose talents are undermined by her colleagues. This novel, I supposed, would be just a book jam-packed with all my favourite literary elements. And it is, it really is, but what makes it so exceptional is what Moore does with those elements, how she manages to take these familiar devices and tell a story that’s suprising and subversive, like nothing I’ve ever encountered before. How the dripping blood on the cover is in fact dripping paint, is the kind of thing I’m talking about. A thumb to the patriarchy, wonderfully queered, and so fiercely feminist, plus it goes down a treat. It’s so fresh, and so interesting. (Read it, read it, read it.)

(This post was a Free Post on my Substack this week! Sign up to receive Pickle Me This directly to your inbox.)

August 12, 2024

The Holiday Reading Round-Up

If appears like I’ve spent the last six weeks mostly on vacation, YOU WOULD BE CORRECT, and what a trip it’s been, so many good books. And some of the books I read last week on our cottage holiday in Haliburton will be familiar if you read my July Substack Essay, “How to Build a Summer Reading List,” beginning with Family Pictures, by Sue Miller, who has only been a summer holiday reading mainstay for me only since 2020, but it feels like since forever. Like so many of her books, this one is a complicated family saga spanning decades, about a marriage that becomes derailed with the arrival of a son who is “different,” Randall, the third of six kids, eventually diagnosed with autism. The problem with this book is that Randall is a device instead of a character, the book and its characters pre-supposing any notion of Randall could be a person with his own consciousness, let alone narrative perspective. But it’s an interesting treatment of how autism was considered in the 1950s, and the ways in which mother were to blame for their children’s diagnoses. Even without Randall, the marriage in this story would have been a complicated one, however, and this nuanced treatment of family dynamics (especially from the point of view of their adult daughter who eventually comes to view her parents, and all their mistakes, with some sympathy) is what makes the story so interesting.

My next pick was Dominick Dunne’s A Season in Purgatory, a totally battered copy I bought for three dollars at The World’s Smallest Bookstore near Kinmount on the way to our cottage. I can’t remember when Dominick Dunne came into my life, but I think it was via his Vanity Fair columns, which then led to me obsessively reading his fun and trashy novels (which, like Sue Miller, I remember lying around our house in paperback during my childhood). I’ve not read him for years though, but I’m on wait-list to receive his son’s memoir The Friday Afternoon Club, so thought a reread would be meaningful in the meantime, and I loved it just as much as I ever did. What is most remarkable is that I have been totally oblivious and only learned a few weeks ago (while listening to Griffin Dunne on a podcast) that Dominick Dunne was gay, and I really can’t believe I didn’t get it, because in the book (whose narrator is a fictionalized version of Dunne) IT’S NOT EXACTLY SUBTLE, but I also can believe I didn’t get it, because I spent most of my life in the most heteronormative bubble….

Next I reread The Joy Luck Club, which came up for me when I published my own book about women’s friendships and someone mentioned it to me, and I realized I hadn’t read it since everybody was reading it in the early 1990s. When I was, of course, a literal child, and I see now how the most interesting parts of the story would have gone over my head at that point. There is a line from Elisa Gabbert’s new book about some books reading up best when you’re too young to really understand them—her example was The Catcher in the Rye, and I concur—but The Joy Luck Club was not one of them, a story of mothers and daughters, and women’s lives, and very complicated friendships. Rereading was a lesson in how much of my earlier reading life must have gone straight over my head.

Next up was A Kind of Intimacy, by Jenn Ashworth, an English writer whose depictions of Lancashire and the northwest have been really important to me. This is the fifth book by her that I’ve read, her debut novel, and it was as easy to read and absolutely uncomfortable (seemingly a contradiction) as all her novels are. This one is set in my husband’s hometown of Fleetwood, Lancashire, which gets described as “dismal,” which it can be, particularly if you’re any of the characters in this book. Annie is an unreliable narrator hoping to put the trauma and violence in her past behind her and make a brand new start, but she becomes strangely fixated on her new next door neighbour and things go awry in ways that will even surprise the readers who’ve seen her coming.

Next was another reread, Brother of the More Famous Jack, the 1982 award-winning debut novel by Barbara Trapido, which was like nothing I’ve ever read before, and so when I read it for the first time, I was mostly baffled. Trapido’s novels are ribald and theatrical, not exactly shaped like English novels at all, and this coming-of-age story unfolds over more than a decade, as daughter of a grocer Katherine becomes enveloped into the eccentric Goldman family. Absolutely nothing is above reproach in this novel, where characters joke about rape and the Holocaust, and the death of a baby and stay in a mental hospital are passed in a few paragraphs (albeit frightfully felt). Politically correct, this novel is not, but neither is it boring or derivative. Having read three other of Trapido’s works, I was finally in a place to properly appreciate it.

And Marian Keyes’ Again, Rachel, was a fairly fitting book to read after it, another ribald story that touches on infant loss, and oh my goodness, Keyes is brilliant. Such a sparkling sense of humour, but the books are containers for such difficult and weighty subjects, and she does such justice to them. There were so many threads in this novel that it seemed impossible she’d work them just right, but she did. These books are so wonderful, and complicated, full of nuance, and worthy of serious attention. They’ve got heft, but they’re also fun to read, which is the only remotely fluffy thing about them.

And then I picked up Commencement, by J. Courtney Sullivan, which touches on the same lack of regard for novels about women that I alluded to in the previous paragraph, except that this is a debut novel and Sullivan is trying to prove herself, wanting to be taken seriously, while Keyes has no fucks to give nineteen novels in. I’d read Sullivan’s novel Maine last year, a summery pick, and enjoyed this too, their contemporary feel but gesture toward a saga.

And finally, Iona Iverson’s Rules for Commuting, by Claire Pooley, which was our audiobook for the drive, and we all loved it so much. It can be challenging to find a pick to suit readers from ages ranging from 11 to 45, and it’s mostly Agatha Christie books that get us through, but I was desperate for a book that wasn’t an Agatha Christie, so decided to take a chance on this one. Which, hilariously, begins with an Agatha Christie epigraph and some fascinating allusions to Murder on the Orient Express, which has been one of our faves. This novel is very different, of course, but we adored it, so utterly engaging, so laugh out loud funny, and I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed an audiobook more. Warmhearted and a little edgy at once—we were all delighted.

And one more, because I can’t resist. We just passed the four year anniversary of Taylor Swift’s Folklore, an album that felt like such a gift during that very hard year and its cruel summer, and so we were listening again because it’s such a midsummer album, and also the song “August,” which has been in my head since the calendar turned. Swift is one of my favourite storytellers, the Bruce Springsteen comparison totally apt. Lines like, “You heard the rumour from Inez, you can’t believe a word she says—most times, but this time it was true.” Or, “Back when we were still changing for the better, when wanting was enough, to believe it was enough. To live for the hope of it all. Cancelled plans just in case you call.” Songs like “Mirrorball” and “Epiphany”—so much feeling. So many stories. We were listening again, when we weren’t listening to Iona Iverson, and I just felt so glad to live in a world where there is such thing as Taylor Swift.

August 1, 2024

SHARK HEART, by Emily Habeck

One of my most frequent experiences of nostalgia is biblio-nostalgia, the longing to be returned to a particular book in a time and place that felt especially sublime. The August I read MALIBU RISING at a rented cottage and could not put it down, the long weekend two years ago when I read Jennifer Close’s MARRYING THE KETCHUPS at the beach, the particular camp chair I was slumped in years ago as I was hastily turning the pages of Amber Dawn’s SODOM ROAD EXIT (lesbians, vampires and abandoned roller coasters on the shores of Lake Erie, oh my!). And yes, while it’s only been a month, I’m still not over having read Shelby Van Pelt’s REMARKABLY BRIGHT CREATURES on our camping trip over the Canada Day long weekend and—especially as we departed on another camping trip last Saturday—I felt the desire to have it happen all over again, the perfect book in the perfect place and time. But this is the kind of experience it’s impossible to manufacture; it either happens or it doesn’t.

But it did, because en-route to our campsite on the banks of Lake Huron, we stopped for in the town of St. Marys, precisely because it was home to a bookshop I’d never visited before, Betty’s Bookshelf, and the town turned out to be wonderful, the bookshop itself just absolutely perfect, stocked with excellent picks (including my own novel!), and every single member of my family left with a title we’d never heard of before.

Which for me was SHARK HEART, by Emily Habeck, enthusiastically recommended by bookseller Wren, a book that MIGHT have been a hard-sell considering its premise (this is a novel about a newlywed couple whose plans go awry when the male partner is diagnosed with a rare disease in which he mutates into a great white shark, yup, really), but Wren promised me that this was a novel about love, and grief and life, and the mutation is a metaphor of sorts, and then I read the back and saw a blurb by none other than Shelby Van Pelt, and decided that this might be the closest I’d come to reading REMARKABLY BRIGHT CREATURES for the first time all over again.

I will say that this is a very different kind of book, far more strange and lyrical, if similarly preoccupied by the desires of sea creatures and blurry lines between us and them, but it similarly hit just perfectly, and as I devoured it (I sound like a great white shark now; it was less bloody than that, I promise). Like Ann Patchett’s TOM LAKE, it’s also about a production of OUR TOWN, which I’ve now even read. This is a novel about the paths in life that take us places where our loved ones can’t follow, about how to face the unimaginable, about how some people are unlucky over and over, terrible patterns repeating, the unfairness of fate, the beauty that’s possible anyway.

I loved it. You should read it. Thank you to Betty’s Bookshelf’s Wren.

July 24, 2024

Summer Reading

Earlier this month I wrote a substack post (available to all readers) about Catherine Newman’s SANDWICH as an ideal beach read. You can read it here!

Paid subscribers can read my July essay, “How to Build a Summer Reading List,” which went up yesterday, and you can read it here. (Thank you to new subscribers! It means everything.)

And finally, there’s a Canadian Goodreads giveaway of my novel ASKING FOR A FRIEND, which makes for an ideal summer read, I must say. Enter before July 29 for your chance to win!