As anyone who participates in bookish events online knows, November is an exceptionally busy month for themed reading; if Margaret Atwood had been born in any other month, I’d’ve chosen another, but here we are.

And, why choose Margaret Atwood as the subject of a reading event to begin with?

Most of the books I read in school were written by men; that’s remarkable, but what I find even more remarkable is that someone else had to point out this fact to me. I expected to read canonical t books in my English classes, and I accepted that most of those books were written by men. But in my final high school English course, a young teacher, who had a part-time contract, taught a Margaret Atwood’s poem, and after that I was inspired to read The Handmaid’s Tale and her other early novels.

None of those books were assigned reading in my university years either; as the 21st century approached, there were options to teach some women writers—their names appeared on the reading lists—but most of my professors opted for traditional selections. So, I read Chaucer and Shakespeare, I read Sterne and Swift: women writers were not writers whose work wasn’t prioritized to study.

Was that really so long ago? Less than three decades? Now young people do study The Handmaid’s Tale. And it seems like that book has been around forever. And that it’s always been recognized as important, if not prescient. But it’s easy to take it all for granted, to believe that women were always recognized as having the capacity to write and publish.

We must not overlook our literary grandmothers, those women who opened doors for other writers. Mr BIP once held the door for Margaret Atwood at the train station. I watched her hold the door at a neighbourhood coffee shop for the man who had just finished cleaning the window. But she’s also opened so many other doors for writers.

It’s not uncommon to see her name in the acknowledgments and authors’ notes written by Canadian authors from other generations, and she frequently recommends writers and books. Pre-internet, via newspaper and magazine articles. Now, on social media. If you follow her on Twitter, you’ll see: it seems like she reads and bookchats as much as she writes.

So for this year’s MargaretAtwoodReadingMonth, I’ll follow and showcase some of her recommendations, the other writers whose work she admires and promotes.

I hadn’t realized, for instance, that she was a very early promoter of Thomas King’s work. King—a Cherokee and Greek writer—is already one of my MustReadEverything authors, but it wasn’t until last year that I learned how influential she had been in the early stages of his career. (I wasn’t surprised though; she has been drawing readers’ attention to the work of indigenous stories and storytelling since Survival.)

A couple dozen books later, after considerable critical acclaim, it would be easy to forget how quickly King’s debut, Medicine River, might have sunk beneath the surface of a disinterested public back in 1990, when it was just one more skinny Penguin paperback on a metal spinner.

In the video alongside, Margaret Atwood and Thomas King discuss his novel Indians on Vacation, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America, and Obsidian, one of his recent Thumps DreadfulWater mystery stories, in later 2020.

And, frankly, I’ve been waiting to talk about Obsidian. I can’t resist a new King novel (Sufferance is his most recent). Even though, on one hand, Thumps Dreadfulwater’s routine isn’t particularly exciting:

“Get up. Eat. Photograph a mountain. Eat. Work in the darkroom. Wat. Sit in an empty house and stare at the walls. Eat. Go to bed. Get up and repeat.”

But, as dedicated readers of the series know, there is another factor to weigh in:

“And each time he got this far, the past would reach out and grab him. Anna Tripp. Callie Tripp. Eureka. The Obsidian Murders. The unfinished business of his life. Perhaps it would never be finished.”

Given the title of this novel, the fifth in this series (following DreadfulWater, The Red Power Murders, Cold Skies, and A Matter of Malice), readers would be correct to assume that some finishing is in order.

Meanwhile, on the other hand, Thumps’ irascible nature keeps things interesting. Even his interior dialogue tends to the extreme; it sways from hilarity to despair.

“He wasn’t sure why he had come. He wasn’t in the market for a vintage car, and he wasn’t in the mood to talk to anyone. And now, here he was, out in the open and vulnerable. So this is how social felt. Somewhere between indifferent and uncomfortable.”

Observations of the natural world, like Moses’ commentary on pelicans: “they get all nice and fat on the coast…and then they come here to nest and raise their young. First sign of cold weather, they head out for someplace warm.”

Age-old patterns, how we move and how we stay.

One character who does not play a significant role in this volume is Freeway, the cat. It’s actually his absence which is most notable. It’s like he represents the kind of unfinished business that Obsidian is seeking to resolve.

At the same time, Thumps’ devotion to Freeway, even in his absence, is also a commentary on how much of himself he devotes to relationships. In one sense, this is key to the idea of his still needing answers about Anna’s and Callie’s murders. In another sense, he has other attachments which are temporarily (at least) rootless in this volume.

“People are easy enough….But with cats you never know.”

Next week, a different slant: an author whose debut landed on my stack only because Margaret Atwood recommended his debut, a collection of linked short stories. Any guesses?

But what about you? Are you reading with #MARM in mind?