Even though I am reading more than I was when we first arrived up here, my habits remain changed. I finished the new Thomas King—Thumps DreadfulWater—mystery. This is not the place to begin with the series (Anne, I’m looking at you!) but for loyal readers, who have followed from the beginning, this volume is the one you didn’t know that you needed. I spun it out for weeks, simply enjoying the pace of it all, taking in a chapter or two at the end of long days, but then I was doubly pleased to have done so.

Yes, there are dark corners: geographically and psychologically. “Deep House was not so much a canyon as it was a wound. As though someone had stretched the earth until it split open. A jagged gash that ran out for about two miles, never more than a hundred yards wide.”

And the connection with the past still thrums, from an historical perspective and from Thumps’s perspective. His observations about personal responsibility and the interconnected nature of life emerge naturally from the plot and do not overlook the impact of trauma and devastation, and the relationships carry us through.

I was inspired to pick up Zora Neale Hurston’s You Don’t Know Us Negroes and Other Essays because Bill was reading her for his 2022 project; this is a substantial volume divided into five parts—”On the Folk”, “On Art and Such”, “On Race and Gender”, “On Politics” and “On the Trial of Ruby McCollum”—one which I enjoyed having been familiar with her autobiographical writing and essays in Dust Tracks on the Road.

The introduction by Henry Louis Gates Jr and Genevieve West reminds readers that “contemporaries Richard Wright, Sterling Brown, and Ralph Ellison accused her of pandering to racist stereotypes in her writings” but ZNH consistently worked against stereotyping. Consider her cheek here:

“The American Indian is a contraption of copper wires in an eternal warbonnet, with no equipment for laughter, expressionless face and that says ‘How’ when spoken to. His only activity is treachery leading to massacres. Who is so dumb as not to know all about Indians, even if they have never seen one, nor talked with anyone who ever knew one?”

ZNH was concerned with realism and her narratives are inherently complex and nuanced (including, for instance, plainspeech) in order to assemble what she viewed as authenticity. Gates and West explain:

“Let us be blunt: Hurston is engaged in a war of representation, defending ‘the race’ against detractors both white and Black, on the one hand – against those who had long parodied and mocked black speech, song, and sermons and other traditional cultural forms—and on the other hand, against the modernists who thought these forms needed to be ‘tidied up,’ given a ‘face lift,’ as Hurston put it, to be fit to be seated at the proverbial welcome table of American and, indeed, world civilization.”

Another volume in my stack thanks to Bill’s project was James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room, but another nudge towards more Baldwin was A. J. Verdelle’s memoir about her literary friendship with Toni Morrison (Miss Chloe), which also has plenty of love and respect for Baldwin’s work.

This 1956 novel follows his debut Go Tell It on the Mountain, and it’s a rich, concise narrative, filled with beautiful and incisive passages about love and betrayal, self-discovery and independence. But here’s a lovely Paris quotation, which doesn’t contain any spoilers:

“Behind that counter sat one of those absolutely inimitable and indomitable ladies, produced only in the city of Paris, but produced there in great numbers, who would be as outrageous and unsettling in any other city as a mermaid on a mountaintop. All over Paris they sit behind their counters like a mother bird in a nest and brood over the cash register as though it were an egg. Nothing occurring under the circle of heaven where they sit escapes their eye, if they have ever been surprised by anything, it was only in a dream—a dream they long ago ceased having.”

His characterization is deft and astute, so that even these “bit players” feel as though they have lives beyond the page (belonging to some other writer’s story perhaps). The story about David and Giovanni is well known in terms of queer literature, so I knew what to expect on that count, but there were more complications than I expected. This isn’t a story one reads for plot, however; rather, it’s a story that forces you to slow, to appreciate the prose and to allow the about-faces of understanding to unfold.

So late that it’s shameful to mention, I’ve finished Robertson Davies’ Leaven of Malice (1954), which was both entertaining and engaging, a temporary relief from reality selected with #1954Club in mind. First I reread the opening volume about life in Salterton, Tempest-Tost with its focus on amateur stage performance, then shifted into the workings of a small-town newspaper, and a problematic advertisement which causes much consternation amongst the affected townfolk. Both volumes drew on the author’s experiences acting and newspaper-man-ning in Peterborough, but with the emphasis on comedic elements.

And I also finally finished Daphne DuMaurier’s Hungry Hill, long after her designated week. Originally I began to read when I was engrossed in the trilogy by Katharine Susannah Prichard about the early days of the gold mining industry in southwestern Australia. I started to get my mining developments confused. One inescapable truth about this collision is that environmental and labour concerns about this industry are not new. Even in a novel written primarily to entertain, the idea that the land is something to be pillaged reigns supreme. “There was wealth in this country of his, ready for the taking, and only the laziness of his fellow-countrymen prevented them from enjoying it. He looked upon it as a duty, something he owed to his country and to the Almighty, to glean the hidden wealth from Hungry Hill and to give it, at a price, to the peoples of the world.”

Later in the summer, Rebecca and I determined to read Cloudstreet, primarily a story about two families’ experience of sharing a remarkable house and their various successes and struggles along the way. “The facts racked themselves up like snooker balls. He was bereaved. He was unemployed. Minus a working hand. Homeless. Broke.” Unsurprisingly, Tim Winton—known also for his environmental efforts to educate about conservation—confronts powerful issues and turns out beautiful sentences. Surprisingly, there are many notes of humour throughout the long novel. And a steady reminder that humanity’s devastation is nothing new: “Dogs get howling all down the way. Somewhere a bicycle rings. Somewhere else there’s a war on. Somewhere else people turn to shadows and powder in an instant and the streets turn to funnels and light the sky with their burning. Somewhere a war is over.”

How about you, have you read any of these? Have you finished reading later than expected for a particular event? (Or, is it simpler to ask, whether you’ve finished a book in time to properly join in with a community reading event?!)