Reading “seasonally” has offered another way to contemplate reading options on my own shelves; and it forms a bridge between my life on-the-page and off-the-page.

The first three quotations below were from books that I did not choose to read because it was fall, and I was surprised to find a fall link; the last two are from books I chose to read at this time; and I’ve included a quote about springtime as well (because, hemispheres).

Ubitquitous pecans provided a detail I’d never considered, the quintessential Canadian geese flying overhead offer a familiar sense of wonder, and the phrase sun-and-wind-woven pleased me immensely.

When the frost turned the leaves and the wind blew them from the trees, it was time to go into the woods and gather nuts, hickory nuts and black walnuts, and chinkapinks. There were always more pecans on the place than could be eaten…
Margaret Walker Jubilee (1966)

There came a late-September night when the two-note plaint of Canada honkers drifted down to ordinary mortals far below. Their high, wild call lifted Matt from sleep; in his pyjamas and barefooted, he rushed outside the kitchen door, to stand in the chill fall night, and to stare upward with pounding heart.
W.O. Mitchell’s Roses Are Difficult Here (1990)

October has started in a lovely sun-and-wind-woven fashion. There are heavy frosts at night, but so far the nasturtiums and cosmos have remained untouched in the back garden.
Dorothy Livesay The Husband (1990)

Token spring quote:
March [Should this be October or November?] at last, and a few grudging intimations of spring. The trees are still bare, the buds still hard, cocooned, but in places where the sun hits there’s meltdown. Dog doings unfreeze, then wane, their icy lacework sallow with wornout pee. Slabs of lawn come to light, sludgy and bestrewn. Limbo must look like this.
Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin (2000)

It all went wrong. And Mother died in late October when the sky was dark by tea-time; when it had been raining for a week; when the house was cold and grimy; when Father hadn’t been home for almost a month. She simply went out and never came back.
Lesley Glaister Honour Thy Father (1991)

Nights of October, of frail, sickle moons, when the earth conceals the shining accomplice of assassins in tis shadow, to make everything all the more mysterious—on such a night, you could say the moon was black.
Angela Carter’s Black Venus (1985)

Most of my fall reading this year revolved around spooky choices, but I haven’t yet mentioned Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of the Turning Leaves (2023), which continues the story begun in Moon of the Crusted Snow (2018).

Twelve years have passed since the northern Indigenous community lost contact with the rest of the world, after an unexplained event leaves them without power and supplies reliably sourced from the south (of the country called Canada today), when the majority of community members had barely begun to reconnect with traditions historically eroded by governmental policies and institutions. The characters have a very anxious and challenging winter in that slim volume, but the book ends abruptly with the arrival of spring, which hints at survival.

One reason that book ends so suddenly, I believe, is that it’s one way to tell the story of colonization (an atrocity occurs and everything about normal life changes) and focus on the outcome without writing the actual ending—because it is still being written. We are witnessing today, in real life not fiction, how Indigenous peoples recover (and struggle) in the wake of an apocalypse, how they restore and return to their own traditions to heal the wounds of the past: it’s a story still unfurling.

In Turning Leaves, the bulk of the story shifts to the next generation. After “the lights went out and we lost everything that we had from the world of the zhaagnaashak, we were given a chance to live another way.” Those who were very young then continue to piece together what happened, though their natural focus is how they live now.

“It was generally known that there had been violence that first winter, and that Even had taken a bullet. And it was, in a way, a source of pride. But in their household, it wasn’t something they discussed.” It’s a moving parallel between what was not discussed, even with family members, by Indigenous survivors of the residential school system; the children in this novel, who are teenagers and young adults now, only know that what happened was traumatic, but neither the scope of it nor the details. But you won’t be thinking about that on a first pass, because it’s all too exciting.

The second volume in the story is just as gripping as the first, and I found myself unable to put it down in the evenings, even after darkness had fallen, and I knew there was a risk of it carrying over into my dreams. (And it did.) There is a lot of action, but I also enjoyed the depiction of traditions in daily life, including the Anishnaabemowin language seamlessly integrated into the story. (Rice explains in the afterword that he is not fluent in the language and thanks Dr Mary Ann Corbiere for her assistance.)

Where Rice excels is characterisation and relationships; despite its marketing, I’m not sure that dystopian lovers would be wholly satisfied, even though I found it relentlessly suspenseful. Anyone interested in Rice’s writing, but reluctant to venture into post-apocalyptic or dystopian territory, could read his short stories in Midnight Sweatlodge or his first novel Legacy.

How do you tend to choose your next read, and do you shake up this habit or follow a reliable pattern that works for you? And do you have any particular winter or summer reading plans for the weeks ahead? 

Finally, for all those who celebrate, Happy Solstice tomorrow!