Of the summer books I mentioned earlier, seven I’ve read, one was recalled to the library for another reader, and three are underway (the Rabagliati graphic novel, Seven Twilights and Jubilee).

I also picked a children’s book to reread (a nostalgic favourite—Jean Little’s Stand in the Wind) and a thriller (Stephen Graham Jones’ I Was a Teenager Slasher) as an homage to past summers’ reading.

The feeling of being immersed in the natural world—in waterways and wooded lands—was a common theme.

And particularly prominent in Theresa Kishkan’s The Weight of the Heart (2020), with its many reflections on the relationship between landscape and memory, water bodies and women’s bodies, and the coastal locations described in Canadian classic novels by Ethel Wilson and Sheila Watson. (Swamp Angel is iconic: there are comments on this older post, but not by anyone who still comes by here to bookchat, so do take a peek.)

The simplicity of Theresa’s language twined with the complex layering of narratives is supremely satisfying. And if I find it hard to gauge how much of this is because of the sense of an enduring favourite story glimpsed between the lines, I think that’s partly the point: the idea of reader and writer reflected and refracted, as if glimpsed in a series of mirrors.

“If I wanted to wait. I had no choice and anyway, the day was sunny. I walked up beyond the bull pine, beyond, beyond, to where I felt I was on the spine of the earth. Forests and grasslands in all directions, and the long beautiful length of Kamloops Lake, fed and replenished by the Thompson River. A train snaked its way along the far shore, too far away to hear. But I could see the water holding the sky in its wide bowl.”

This is Isabel, but through her, I feel Maggie from Ethel Wilson’s novel being “fed and replenished” as though I am right alongside them. I see them seeing that sky, as I extrapolate from Isabel’s view to Maggie’s and back to my own imagination once more. (Most international readers who know Ethel Wilson will likely be pleased to see Hetty Dorval below, as it’s better known overseas than Swamp Angel.)

“But I wanted to work on my map, find a way to map the books I knew were as important as so many taught in the classrooms of the universities and in which women could not find their own bodies, their own experiences of the country. In which Frankie Burnaby left, Hetty left.”

But Isabel is imagining quite another presence in her scenes, her brother—whose absence she feels keenly. So the story is not all about other stories that have been published, stories with endings, but also stories which have been suspended, improperly ended.

  “Izzy, leave me alone. I’m ok,” she imagines him saying. “I don’t care about how much my heart weighed. I’m glad the kid found my scarab. Where I am is rivers, the most far-out boats, and I can paddle through rapids without even touching the water. Watch for coyotes. Read your books and find your way.”

Anybody who looks to books as though they are maps will love this book as much as I have.

Nobody has time to read in Margaret E. Derry’s Killarney Memoir: Summers over a Century (2008)—the second of her slim memoirs chronicling core memories of her family’s cottage over six generations on what’s called northern Georgian Bay in Ontario today. (Wikipedia comments on Indigenous stewardship of these lands, and there’s a series of representative shoreline photographs, although no mention of the fascinating cave systems.)

Her watercolour paintings are filled with lots of trees and water and rocks, but I love the way her pencil drawings capture tcxtures with the girls’ swimsuits—the tactility of straps on tanned shoulders, and bunched fabric that requires regular tugging—and wet hair clumped, lodged among the sun-dried (and after just a few days, the sun-bleached) chunks. Her prose is clear and direct, her reminiscences are sensorily rich. (Reese, I included this one for you. Publisher’s page.)

This is the first time I’ve read Peter Heller, thanks to Emma’s encouragement, and her specific recommendation of The River (2019) for its northern Ontario setting. It was the quintessential summer read, in terms of pacing and plotting. His style is minimalist except when it comes to talk of landscape. I loved seeing the fireweed on the page, and his descriptions of fog and wildfire felt both beautiful and menacing: suitable for a wilderness survival story. Which is what this becomes, even though it begins with two college-age men taking a break from their books.

Besides the boys, there are four other characters on the water, and then there are only three, which is where things get interesting, then deadly. Both Jessica John’s Bad Cree and Richard van Camp’s “On the Wings of this Prayer” in Godless But Loyal to Heaven offer a richer and more complex view of the windigo/weetigo (there’s a sense that Heller has recounted campfire stories rather than researched Indigenous cultures). But The River is engaging from the beginning, with a subplot of loss and grief that adds impact to the thriller’s resolution—and apparently there has been a sequel, since, called The Guide.

I think that I have more ideas about what constitutes summer reading than reading for other seasons. But maybe I just haven’t thought about it enough.

September does bring to mind “serious reading” because it’s back-to-school in these parts (but, then, we’ve already finished our Russian Lit project, Bill and Bron and I).

It launches the busy season in the publishing world (but I am trying to focus on backlist reading currently).

And there is the matter of spooky reading, but that extends only to the end of November: so it doesn’t feel long enough to be a season, does it? (Even so, I’ll have some bookchat about spooky reads soon.)

But while I think more, about what reading remains ahead of me in 2025–what do YOU think of, when you think of September reading?–I will write up this season’s Short Story Quarterly.