July/August reading

Last time I closed out two months of reading with a theory about myself: that my patience for long books had quietly run out, and that this was a me problem rather than a book problem. I also listed five books I had open and admitted I was only really reading two of them. One of those was a Louise Penny I'd picked up the week before.

That Penny turned out to be the best thing I read all summer. The two months since have made me think the theory was wrong.

A note on the calendar: July's two books, the Wayne Johnston and the Mark Critch, already had their say in the last round-up, so I won't repeat myself. What follows starts on July 21st and runs to the end of August.

The one I'd picked up last week

The Nature of the Beast is my favourite Gamache book so far, and at this point I have read a lot of them. A nine-year-old in Three Pines tells tall tales as a full-time occupation - aliens, dinosaurs, walking trees - so when he runs into the bistro saying he found a gun in the woods that's bigger than a house, nobody goes to look. Then he turns up dead, and it becomes clear that this time the boy had not made anything up. I enjoyed it cover to cover, which is not a sentence I got to write about a single book in the last round-up. Afterwards I found out it's partly based on something that actually happened, and that reframed the whole thing in a way I'm still not quite over. I'm not going to say which part. Go in cold.

Started July 21st, finished August 3rd, which is why this round-up starts in July at all.

The one everyone was right about

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. A flu wipes out most of the world in about two weeks. The book moves between the night it starts, when a famous actor dies onstage in the middle of King Lear in Toronto, and twenty years later, following a travelling troupe of actors and musicians who walk between the settlements around the Great Lakes performing Shakespeare to whoever is still there. A real page-turner, 352 pages, ten days, and one of the most hopeful dystopian novels I've read in a long time. The genre has a default setting where everything is grim and everyone is awful, and this book quietly declines to do that. It cares more about what survives a collapse than about the collapse itself, and it is generous about people and emphasises the importance of culture. A beautiful story even though the backdrop is gritty.

It's also partly a Toronto book, which I appear to keep doing by accident.

The one I still haven't rated

Fifth Business by Robertson Davies is a retired schoolmaster writing a long and rather annoyed letter about his own life, after his colleagues saw him off with a tribute that made him sound like furniture. It goes back to a snowball thrown in a small Ontario town in 1908, which misses the boy it was aimed at and hits a pregnant woman instead, and then to the sixty years he spends carrying what that snowball did. The title is a theatre term for the character who is neither hero nor villain nor love interest, but without whom the plot cannot resolve.

It took me twenty-five days. It is 272 pages, the shortest of the three, and by a wide margin the slowest I've moved through anything this year.

I finished it on August 29th and I still haven't given it a rating, which is unusual - I normally know where I've landed a chapter before the end. It isn't that I disliked it. I've been turning it over for a week now and I keep not arriving anywhere. Some books hand you your opinion on the final page. This one didn't, and at some point I decided that leaving the stars blank is the answer.

Speed had nothing to do with length

So much for running out of patience. Two of these moved fast and neither is what you'd call short, and the one that crawled was the smallest book in the pile. Whether I tore through a book had nothing to do with how many pages it had. It had to do with whether the book was doing something on the page I happened to be on. Johnston lost me at 562 pages because the middle stopped happening, not because 562 is a big number.

One thing to notice: all three are Canadian. Penny is Quebec, Mandel is British Columbia by way of everywhere, Davies is about as Ontario as a writer can get. I didn't necessarily plan that but these days I source a lot of my reading suggestions from fellow Canadians and the occasional "people who enjoyed this also enjoyed that". As someone who read mostly European and US authors his whole life I enjoy to learn more about the people, history, and culture of the place I call home by choice.

On and off reading: Meditations and the Ryan Holiday since June, the Canadian politics textbook since May, Canadian history for dummies since February. And then I just started another Gamache the day I finished Davies.