I was reading Walter Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian (1818) as the borrowing days approached—days at the end of March, thought to have been borrowed from April so that winter could last just a few more stormy days.

We had a most magnificent storm, which shut down the city for a few days, and just when I’d finally managed to shovel a hip-high pathway to the recycling bins, the pickup was cancelled in anticipation of a second, smaller storm.

It reminded me that I haven’t written about my winter reading yet.

About how cold it is when Sam Selvon’s classic 1956 novel, The Lonely Londoners, opens:

“One grim winter evening, when it had a kind of unrealness about London, with a fog sleeping restlessly over the city and the lights showing in a blur as if is not London at all, but some strange place on another planet, Moses hop on a number 46 bus” to meet another man coming from Trinidad.

(It has a divine description of summer too and, between, it perfectly captures that sense of suspension, when one has left one home and not yet found another.)

About the shock of not only new places but new temperatures, in Acadian (Québécoise) writer Antonine Maillet’s Pélagie, where the Acadians are exiled from the southern United States (1979; translated by Philip Stratford, 1983):

“When at the end of February they were finally turfed out of their hibernation, crouched at the end of their ice tunnels, frozen stiff under the floorboards of the carts buried under the snow, or huddled down in the crotches of tree roots, you could count every knob on their backbones, on all of them.”

There’s no snow in Myrtle Rose White’s No Roads Go By (1932), set in Australia though:

“It had been a short winter; short and cold and dry. Beautiful sunsets painted the west night after night, for of all our wonderful sunsets I think those of the winter the most beautiful of all. There were many frosty nights, and huge wood fires burned for weeks without once going out. A belar-log thrown to the back of the chimney, last thing at night, smouldered on its bed of red coals; grey ash softly covered the embers, keeping them red till morning.”

As Valentine’s Day approached, I chose Can Xue’s Love in the New Millenium (2013; Trans. Annelise Finegan Wasmoen, 2018) with Rebecca’s love/heart theme in mind.

I found it really disorienting at first but, read in a slightly fevered state, I found it nearly unputdownable. (After being housebound for some time due to the snow, we became housebound due to illness.)

I found myself swept away by how differently various characters valued relationships and commitments, and how various men and women experienced opportunities and restrictions. A peek at her Wikipedia page reveals her stature and accomplishments alongside words like ‘abstract’ and ‘avant-garde’ but this passage also shows her direct, simple language and patient, methodical characterisation.

“In the deep of night the city appeared to be dead. The street lights failed to eliminate its dark places.

Suddenly Cuilan sensed some object churning in the depths of the shadows. She heard these rolling things make a sound, hu hu hu.

She thought the sound was melancholy, also pleasant, reminding her of how she felt sitting in the honeymoon suite talking with Jin Zhu.

She wondered, what kind of person is Jin Zhu?

It was as if she had different expectations from life than Cuilan. What kind of expectations?

The two women who escaped from the mill and made their way in the world seemed already to have experienced many changes.

Cuilan admired them, but no she could not be like them.

What category did she belong to? “Calling it ‘not one type or the other’ would fit pretty well,” she said aloud, to herself.”

C.J. Dennis’ The Sentimental Bloke (1915) is the story of Bill and Doreen, and whatever I’d been expecting, this wasn’t it, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Dennis is described in the introduction (by Barry Humphreys) as having committed two unforgivable crimes: writing in the “jargon of the gutter” and being popular.

He imagines the poet and storyteller having frequented “all the taverns and billiard parlours” of Melbourne “with his notebook, like a collector of folk songs crouches behind hedgerows” to catch the perfect scrap of dialogue, and speaks of his comic eye and ear.

(This edition is illustrated with little pairs of cupids drawn by a man who’s quoted in such a way that he sounds like he burst forth from this volume, Hal Gye.)

“This ev’nin’ I was sittin’ wiv Doreen,
Peaceful an’ ‘appy wiv the day’s work done,
Watchin’, be’ind the orchard’s bonzer green,
The flamin’ wonder of the settin’ sun.

I’m not sure why the style didn’t annoy me, all I can say is that it charmed me.

In March, I read with Wales and Ireland in mind, including a collection of stories by Maeve Brennan. The Springs of Affection (1998) has been in my stacks for so long that my familiarity has transformed into the idea that I love every one of these stories.

Mostly without basis, as I’ve only read a few via the archives of The New Yorker, and have avoided the collections. Why would knowing some of the stories matter? It has seemed a deterrent, as though I’m a record player that must select the disc size at the start. This year, I’m undertaking to reread as many books as last (18), so rereading a few stories suits me perfectly.

“It was spring. We sat in her large, pleasant living room, with the trees all fresh and green outside on Garfield Street, and the shrubs bursting into bloom – white, pink, blue, yellow – in her garden, where the children were giving themselves wholeheartedly to some raucous game, and we began to speak, as we often do, of the time when we too were small together.”

Which brings us to spring! As announced by Quino’s Mafalda, her first volume of comics translated by Frank Wynne (2025).

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