As usual, Kaggsy and Simon have chosen a year rich with reading possibilities.

As not-exactly-unusual, I have done better at gathering possibilities than of reading them.

Initially I planned to expand my reading of James Baldwin, but the interlibrary-loan copy wasn’t speedy (sometimes it’s a week, sometimes weeks—depending how quickly the fulfilling library responds and whether their item is immediately available).

When it became clear it wasn’t going to arrive in time to have it finished, I started looking around, on my own shelves and in the local library, for alternatives.

First, I looked for Canadian books, which yielded Rudy Wiebe’s Peace Shall Destroy Many, the celebrated and acclaimed author of The Temptations of Big Bear (later winner of the Governor General’s Award for Fiction). Peace was controversial in its time; other town residents and other Mennonites objected to his depiction of everyday life in communities fraught with tensions in wartime (it’s set in Saskatchewan, in 1944).

Hugh Garner’s Silence on the Shore has an interesting publication history; Garner argued with his publisher and it was reissued by another house (some copies titled with a “The”, others not—this is a reprint). He’s most famous, arguably, for Cabbagetown, but also wrote best-sellers. Silence fits with my rereading of Atwood’s The Edible Woman, too, with both books opening in rooming houses, in the same neighbourhood of Toronto, with landlady-scenes.

The Donnellys Must Die by Orlo Miller is a book that mesmerised me as a teen: true crime from a nearby small town. It hadn’t occurred to me that residents of entire households nearby could be slaughtered like they were on television (eventually this story inspired a TV series too, set in Hells Kitchen, but just for one season and not a recreation). And I was obsessed by the idea that the story would not have emerged, if a boy from a neighbouring farm hadn’t been unexpectedly onsite the night the mob attacked (having stayed over to do farm work the next morning, hiding when violence erupted).

Other books piqued my interest as well:

Walter Farley’s Man O’ War (unread on my shelves since I was a kid, but I’ve enjoyed others from that shelf in recent years),

Ousmane Sembene’s God’s Bits of Wood (particularly interesting with recent shifts in French engagement with Africa),

Barbara Comyns’ The Skin Chairs (a MRE, must-read-everything, author),

Maurice Sendak’s Chicken Soup with Rice (a childhood favourite)

and two Ray Bradbury books, Something Wicked This Way Comes (I think I’ve only seen the movie?) and R is for Rocket.

But so far?

I’ve reread the Maurice Sendak story, complete with its simple but charming October verse. Here’s Carole King’s version from the “Really Rosie” cartoon.

And last weekend, I read the first in Ray Bradbury’s short story collection, the title story.

R is for Rocket is a book that I didn’t want to read originally; it was a book on a shelf when I wanted to read something different (and, presumably, didn’t have permission to walk to the library). But I absolutely loved it (and knew nothing of Mavis Gallant’s advice not to burst through a collection stories) and reread it often enough that the opening pages barely retain a connection to the spine.

At the time, the stories wouldn’t have felt old-fashioned, because the small city and village libraries I knew were stocked with plenty of older books. On rereading, the story feels quintessentially historical (originally published in 1943, before it was compiled in this volume), particularly in its dialogue and its imagined future, as the boys rush to see a rocket take-off:

“I zippered myself into a jumper, yanked on my boots, clipped my food-capsules to my hip-pocket, for I knew there’d be no food or even thought of food today, we’d just stuff with pills when our stomachs barked, and fell down the two-story vacuum elevator,”

But, then, I thought about the people who call a glass of water with a scoop of powder breakfast (I’m a pancake lover, oatmeal respecter) and it doesn’t seem off-base after all.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter, because the story is about how what’s been only a dream during childhood becomes a reality, about one of those ordinary moments that turns out to be a hinge that’s transformed a life into two parts—a before and an after.

The introduction to this collection illuminates the parallels between the author’s life and some of the characters’ dreams and imaginings: “This is a book then by a boy who grew up in a small Illinois town and lived to see the Space Age arrive, as he hoped and dreamt it would.”

Thanks to Karen and Simon, for hosting this event, even though it’s taken me a week just to write about a single story. I’ll get to Baldwin, because it’s travelled a long way to me—and not by rocket either.