Margaret Atwood Reading Month 2026 #MARM2026

Novembers for readers online are often a busy month.

Like many others, this month I’ll also be reading novellas, science-fiction, German literature (my first time! Buddenbrooks, anyone?), non-fiction and… oh, I feel like I’m forgetting something?

Maybe it’s only all the other projects in parallel (like Proust, Penelope Aubin, Persepolis, in memory of Marjane Satrapi)?

And… reading to celebrate Margaret Atwood Reading Month, for the ninth year!

My thought of rereading Survival still suits my reading mood, and if you are in the mood to join, that’s lovely, but I know some of you have already begun your selections according to your reading moods at this time… and are finding them somewhere between interesting and enjoyable. Do tell!

This morning, I’ve read “What Why and Where is Here” to test out Survival. Which, in suitable Atwoodian form, begins by saying what the book is not. I do admire the approach of calibrating readers’ expectations from the start, as I know, for myself, how often expectations dictate how a reading experience unfurls. When they are not in synch, the reading is often disappointing and can be irrecoverable.

MARM 2026 PLANS

Launch (November 1)
Survival: One, Two, Three (November 4)
Week Two: Update and Check-In (November 8)
Survival: Four, Five, Six (November 11)
Week Three: Update and Check-In (November 15)
Margaret Atwood’s 87^th Birthday (November 18)
Survival: Seven, Eight, Nine (November 18)
Week Four: Update and Check-In (November 22)
Survival: Ten, Eleven, Twelve (November 25)
Wrap-Up (November 30)

Survival is not an “exhaustive, intensive, all-inclusive treatise on Canadian literature”, it’s not a historical treatment of CanLit, it’s neither evaluative nor biographical, and it’s not… original.

There are, MA says, books that do all of these things, several of them. (Over a couple of pages, some are listed, with their costs and, at the end of each chapter, key texts discussed are also itemised with their retail values. In my 1972 copy, the most expensive I’ve noticed is Books in Canada, $20.00, a volume typically purchased only by professionals, librarians or booksellers or publishers for instance.)

“My book stands in relation to them as a vitamin pill to a gourmet meal; it has the virtue of being cheaper to acquire and faster to swallow, but it misses out on a lot of overtones and refinements. It bypasses too, many ripe nits that could be well picked; but I leave the plucking of these to others who perhaps find such pursuits more enjoyable.”

So straightaway I find myself looking up a definition, which I hadn’t been expecting. Nits are not only eggs laid by lice or other parasitic insects, nits are also units of luminescence. I’m sure that I didn’t think twice about this on any earlier reading, which just goes to show that rereading does reflect how different you are on each reading (and apparently I, now, am thinking more about lice than ever before). But my dedication to introductions and prefaces and the like has been erratic; it could be that, in the past, I’ve been more eager to get to what the book IS rather than what it is NOT.

So if Survival is not any of those things, what is it? It’s about patterns, MA says. And it explores broader questions like “What is there to read about in this country?” and “What’s Canadian about Canadian literature?” and what it means when we talk about the personal and universal when it comes to talking about what we read, but we consistently avoid the national. (Which is like trying to teach anatomy while talking only about the head and the feet, she says. Incomplete.)

I’ll have more to say about that later during this week. If any other Canadians plan to join, I’ll write more granularly and, if not, I will keep to the broader sweep of her chapters, so that international readers can enjoy it too.

When I last reread this (nearly ten years ago), I had fun thinking about what newer books had been written on CanLit but, in this instance, I might play, instead, with the idea of how newer books with similar themes by international writers do/don’t fit with the patterns she notes in CanLit in Survival.

And, around the edges, I’m going to read a few poems, seek out some recent interviews, and maybe watch the last season of “Handmaid’s Tale”. (Survival will also take me to some viewing; I’ve been saving a film about Al Purdy in my queue for years!)

That’s me: what are you doing to celebrate MARM this November? And, I know there are a couple of new MARMers here, welcome!

Help yourself to something warm to drink, from under the cosy, and a sweet from the plate. Oh, what’s that you have there? Do tell!