Summer 2019, In My Notebook

This year I added another writer to my MRE list. In truth, he was one of the writers whose stories provoked that kind of MustReadEverything commitment early on, but I didn’t have a word for it yet.

Authors who told the kind of stories that I wanted on my shelves were authors whose new books I yearned for. But it was still the stories I liked best.

I hadn’t lit upon the idea of finding something magical in an author’s general perspective on the world, on a way of thinking that made me want to support a person’s work as much as I wanted to read what they wrote.

A couple of summers ago, I reread Guy Gavriel Kay’s The Summer Tree. I borrowed the audiobook from the library so that I could listen too, and I was washing the dishes when I read that scene.

It’s somewhere in the middle  – I wasn’t ready, I hadn’t remembered it happening so soon – and if you’ve read it, you know the one.

So that you know why I was standing in the kitchen with my hands dangling in the dishwater, Just weeping. It was sunny. It was summer. And I was overcome.

So when I returned to the book this summer, I knew that was in the wings. I expected it. I was prepared. And it was just as awful. On the fourth reading.

One reason not to make a list is the possibility of it being imperfect. Here’s a gap in mine, but consider it mended now.

Because that risk is also good reason to make a list. So it’s less likely you’ll miss something.