When I last wrote here, I could have posted one of Alistair MacLeod’s famous short story openings: “It is August now, towards the end, and the weather can no longer be trusted.” It’s from “The Closing Down of Summer” and I think of it every year about mid-way through August.

But now I could turn to Maud Hart Lovelace: her talk of how September was very Septemberish that year, or that it smells like the first day of school. And, soon enough, we’ll have the kind of October day that Colson Whitehead describes as being the kind of cold that sneaks up on you like a pickpocket.

I have been reading in a gust, all season (with just a couple of disruptions), determined to make these six months of to-and-fro-ing to the library worthwhile.

The bicycle rides are cool in the mornings now, and we are nearing the end of what the Anishinaabe call Leaves Changing month—Waatebagaa-giizis—with Leaves Falling next. It won’t be long, before I drop the last returns of the season into the slot, and I renew my connections with the books on my own shelves.

This morning I updated all the various reading challenges, just to see if there’s anything else I want to borrow, to edge those toward completion. It seems unlikely that any of them will be complete at the end of the year, actually; but I’ve enjoyed playing with them along the way, and chatting about them with others (some more, some less, dedicated to finishing).

Over the summer, I’ve borrowed quite a few new books by Canadian and Indigenous-Canadian writers; the one in this photo which I haven’t yet finished is P.P. Wong’s Slice the Water—because I just finished reading Hum by Helen Phillips, which Bookish Beck and I chatted about along the way, and I try to keep only one of this sort of story in my stack.

And what sort of book is that? A rather ordinary story really, about day-to-day life, in a slightly altered version of our world right now: sometimes this really gets under my skin. And the fact that the book has quotes from both Kevin Chong and Nalo Hopkinson makes me feel both eager and nervous.

And what was I planning to say about all this reading? A little about the other 18th-century women writers I’ve been exploring. A little about my ongoing audiobook experiments, and my flailing effort to read more non-fiction. A little about the slow progress on some pet projects (prize nominees and imprints, and the like), and wrangling the back-issues of magazines that breed in dark corners unobserved. Maybe even a little more about some of these very books…

But, will I be quoting Anakana Schofield about November instead? We’ll see! But, meantime, a moment to #LoveYourLibrary … the source of so much information and entertainment since May. (BookishBeck hosts this event the last Monday of each month.)

If you could add a single volume to my library list, to fetch before the snows come, what would you choose?