After I finally managed to finish the Toronto Public Library’s reading challenge last year, after so many years of leaving it half-done, some of you asked if I was planning to do the new challenge. Not likely, I said. But then the 2025 challenge was in the form of
In reading this fifty-page-long story, I followed the instructions that Saunders set out for us in the first story, curious to see whether the process would prove valuable. Saunders, himself, took a unique approach with the first of the seven stories he considers herein; he offered commentary after each
May’s story is Leo Tolstoy’s “Master and Man” (1895), the longest of the seven Russian stories that George Saunders contemplates in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, which Bill and Bron and I will read in the next couple of weeks and discuss mid-month. (The project details
If I were to witness a murder, I figure I’d be like that woman in the Swedish drama “The Breakthrough” who sees the perpetrator straight on but, later, cannot recall a single facial feature. So Saunders’ point about the previous story, about Turgenev’s physical descriptions in “The Singers”, didn’t
Mavis Gallant is sitting “in her apartment on Rue Jean Ferrandi” when, in a “voice gentle yet commanding”, she says “There are two kinds of writers to me, the Tolstoy and the Dostoevsky.” With this Russian project underway, I sat up a little straighter. “And they’re both extraordinary,” she
