As you might guess, many kilometres north now, I’ve found that the weather grows cold more quickly. It was a shock to change the bedding, to the December-Freeze set, at the end of September. To pull the scarves and toques from the closet (but not, quite, mittens and gloves). To realise that planting fall bulbs meant I should have been digging on Labour Day weekend (the first in September) rather than Thanksgiving weekend (the second in October). To convince myself that it’s actually October, I’ve pulled a childhood copy of It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown into my stack.

The Massey Lecture for 2022 is Tomson Highway’s Laughing with the Trickster. You might recall that Highway is a MRE (MustReadEverything author of mine) and recently I enjoyed some of his illustrated children’s books, about growing up on the land with his brother as a Cree boy. (As an accomplished pianist, he also played in the Ottawa ceremony that marked Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral, following the official event in London.) The Massey Lectures are broadcast every November, after they are published in book form and favourites include those by Thomas King (on Indigenous storytelling) and Adam Gopnik (on winter).

This reminded me that I’ve never read Margaret Atwood’s Payback, only listened to the five Massey Lecture segments on CBC’s Ideas in 2008. (These are available for listening in Canada, but I’m not sure if they’ll play for international listeners.) So, I pulled them off the shelf because next month, November, is also Margaret Atwood Reading Month for me, and you are most welcome to join. 

You can follow links from previous participants’ posts, from previous years, here, if you’re unsure where to begin and you’re new to Margaret Atwood’s work. Or maybe, as a dedicated fan, you’ve already got a volume in mind, whether to reread or read. Here, in the stack, also, is one of her earlier essay collections: Moving Targets. I’ll post each week during November about my #MARM activities, but I’m going to be more whimsical about my selections this year, curious to see where that leads.

Harold Johnson’s The Cast Stone (2011) landed in my stacks because I picked up his Corvus and realised it might be connected to this previous dystopian novel. Whether the two works are directly linked, I’m not sure—I’ll read them both regardless. His political and environmental wisdom is sorely needed now, and although I haven’t formally added him to my MRE list, I’ve scribbled his name there in my mind.

Hassan Al Kontar’s man@the_airport (2021) is one of the books in my ongoing reading about migration. I’m reading Cecil Foster’s They Call Me George: The Untold Story of Black Train Porters and the Birth of Modern Canada as research for an essay on the subject. Lyndsie Bourgon’s Tree Thieves is part of my continuing exploration of writers confronting the climate crisis. (I thought Lee recommended it, but apparently not, so who was it?) And every day I read a few pages from Alice Walker’s journals, Gathering Blossoms Under Fire. She just wrote a letter to Langston Hughes on the day he died, which brought my recent Writing Life project to mind.

Is there a stubborn resident in your current stack, a book you cannot seem to finish reading?
Or, is there a brand new addition about which you’re extraordinarily excited?