Unless this is your first MARM, you know I’m terrible for falling behind with periodical reading, which is to say that I felt super-on-top-of-things this week, while reading the October 18^th Book Review in the NYT, but what fun to find that week’s “By the Book” with Bonnie Garmus and her answer to the “literary dinner party question” (i.e. whom to invite) is appropriately MARM-themed. For her dinner, she’s inviting:

“Margaret Atwood because she’s Margaret Atwood, but also because our dads were both entomologists and I thought we could talk about how many times we’ve been bitten, and by what.”

(Also invited by Garmus: you’re curious aren’t you? Mark Twain for being “funny and fearless” and Susan Orlean for “her ability to make even the smallest stories sting.”)

In the Zeit-MARMst or MARM-Geist:

• Rebecca and Kaggsy have been planning ahead; and,
• Bill has posted his thoughts on Bodily Harm.

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)

To Watch, New for #MARM2026:

Last week, a video from the October ceremony from “Journalists for Human Rights” was uploaded, with MA’s keynote address in accepting the JHR Award for Extraordinary Achievement for using “storytelling to defend human rights and give voice to those silenced by oppression”.

Her work has “repeatedly confronted authoritarianism and the erosion of rights” through novels like The Handmaid’s Tale, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, and the Maddaddam trilogy, say the JHR, and she has “long advocated for writers facing censorship and persecution around the world.”

Presented by Lisa Laflamme (fired, at least in part, because she wouldn’t stop talking about Ukraine and she refused to dye her hair), she describes MA as “one of the most banned authors worldwide” and cites her favourite quote (which I’ve lifted for this week’s flipbox at the bottom here).

In other November reading:

I’ve got SciFi Month in mind, reading Mat Johnson’s Invisible Things (2022) which opens like this: “After months in deep space conductng an intensive field study of social dynamics aboard the cryoship SS Delany, Nalini Jackson, NASAx Post-Doctorate Fellow of Applied Sociology, D.S. Sc., came to an uncomfortable conclusion: She didn’t really like people, on the whole.” The first chapter is twenty-five pages of characterisation and life on a space ship, and then something happens, and I was hooked. (1/4 read)

#SciFiMonth2026 Challenge Hosts: Annemieke at A Dance with Books, Emma at Words and Peace, imvril at There’s Always Room for One More, Lisa of Dear Geek Place, and Mayri at Bookforager (Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Klaus Pontoppidan (STScI) | Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI); Text: Dolly Parton. RIP, Queen. And Shakespeare.)

For German Literature Month, I’m reading Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, because Edwin Frank was gushing about it in Stranger than Fiction (2025). It’s Mann’s first novel, published in 1901, and I’m reading the translation by H.T. Lowe-Porter. So far one character has died, another has been born, and there’s a lot of talk about dinner and inheritance. This seems appropriate, somehow, and the chapters are short, so I just read a few, feel as though nothing has happened, but in a comfortable way, but I’m wondering if that will hold for 800 pages. (1/8 read)

#GermanLitMonth Challenge Hosts: Caroline at Beauty is a Sleeping Cat, Tony at Tony’s Reading List and (previously) Lizzy of Lizzy’s Literary Life

For Novellas in November, I’ve pulled Damion Searls’s Analog Days (2025) from the shelf, which someone was super enthusiastic about so now I am too. I’ve just finished two novellas by Quebecois authors that left me feeling a little puzzled, so I’m hoping this leaves me feeling a little less unmoored. Near the end of October, I posted about other novellas I’ve read this year, including Conor Kerr’s Beaver Hills Forever, which might make my favourites list for this year. (Well, I’m calling it a novella, but I’m not sure that’s how he sees it.)

#NovNov26 Challenge Hosts: Cathy at 746 Books and Rebecca at Bookish Beck

For Reading Scotland Month, I’m reading Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1886), because I read Treasure Island last year for Kaggsy’s annual celebration on November 12, and wanted to read on in my fancy-schmancy-cutting-edge-in-1978-omnibus. Actually, I learned of this challenge from Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings, so I didn’t get to thinking about other options, but now it feels like I’m noticing Scottish writers everywhere! Isn’t that always the way. (First chapter read)

#ReadingScotland26 Challenge Host: Joanne at Portobello Book Blog

With the spirit of the Nonfiction November in mind, I’ve got a little stack of non-fiction that I’ve been reading in fits-and-starts all year, and I’ve resolved to finish them all this month. So I’ve read a couple more chapters in Edwin Frank’s book (see Buddenbrooks). And I’ve restarted my it’ll-take-all-year non-fiction choice for 2026, David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, which is eleventy-billion pages long, but November could make up for having spent most of my summer with novels. This year has been slight for NF for me, but I will post about pairings later this month. (1/2 read)

#NonFicNov26 Challenge Hosts: Heather at Based on a True Story, Frances at Volatile Rune, Liz at Adventures in Reading, Running and Working from Home, and Deb at Reader Buzz

Some of these challenges are new-to-me (if I’ve got anything wrong, please let me know), and I’m just going to see how I do, adding in one book timed for the theme this year. Earlier this year I read one book by a Scottish writer (Walter Scott) and one by a German writer (Jenny Erpenbeck) and I’ve read a few SF books, including this year’s winner of the UKLG Prize for Fiction, Audition. I’m interested in reading more! (Always.)

How has your reading been, so far, in November?

When Survival (1972) was published by the fledgling press House of Anansi, the print run of 3,000 copies was thought to be ambitious. Especially for a book subtitled A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. It went on to sell 50,000 copies between 1972 and 1975. Wow, eh?

Margaret Atwood’s first collection of poetry, The Circle Game, was one of Anansi’s four inaugural publications, when the press was founded in 1967. (Circle had been published in 1966—a run of 420 copies, with a cover designed with Letraset and stick-on red dots from a stationery shop—and was technically out-of-print via a small poetry press.)

In 1971, one of Anansi’s founders asked MA to join its board (for poetry/fiction), and that was the same year she was a substitute professor for an English class at Victoria College in Toronto, which included Canadian writers on the syllabus. Anansi was already relying on more commercial publications to fund the costs of publishing Canadian poetry, and she suggested a volume about Canadian literature, marketed to ordinary readers not academics.

She was correct to anticipate sales; she didn’t anticipate the controversy. Not from every direction, mind you: some were appreciative (biographer Rosemary Sullivan says, “delighted”, in The Red Shoes).

Canadian novelist Margaret Laurence viewed Survival as “the first attempt, EVER, to state why Can writing is not the same as Amer or Eng. I could see, finishing the book, your worry that a) teachers might think—Aha! This is Everything We Need to Know About Can Writing; and b) writers might think—Have I A Suitable Victim, Human or Animal, And If Not, What In Hell Is the Matter With Me? But worry not. These are the chances we have to take…. The book is good, provocative, and (I think) true.”

And after the critics emerged, the novelist Adele Wiseman wrote: “By the way, I hope you don’t mind my mentioning that I have been appalled at the way the pack has been snarling after you this past while. For a long time I’ve had this theory that many people, having been partially smothered themselves at some time, cannot bear having an exceptional vitality in their midst….” (This letter, too, is quoted in Sullivan’s biography.)

Laurence’s observation is easily summed up as “you can’t please everyone” and Wiseman’s as “don’t mind them, I’ve got your back”. Useful advice and consolatory remarks, from friendly folk. It seems like even the most vociferous critics’ objections boil down to the idea that they felt the emphasis should have been on a different syllable. To my way of thinking, MA is suggesting ideas, exploring them, inviting discussion, rather than lecturing—but maybe that’s more obvious decades later.

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: CHAPTER ONE

“Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that Canada as a whole is a victim, or an “oppressed minority”, or “exploited”. Let us suppose, in short, that Canada is a colony. A partial definition of a colony is that it is a place from which a profit is made, but not by the people who live there: the major profit from a colony is made in the centre of the empire. That’s what colonies are for, to make money for the “mother country”, and that’s what—since the days of Rome and, more recently, of the Thirteen Colonies—they have always been for. Of course there are cultural side effects which are often identified as “the colonial mentality”, and it is these which are examined here; but the root cause for them is economic.”

Beginning with colonial power dynamics, then concepts of victimhood are outlined and positioned (Wikipedia), but the chapter ends with encouragement to have nuanced discussions and a reminder that, of course, there are exceptions (and full-on escapes!) for each of the four categories.

NATURE THE MONSTER: CHAPTER TWO

“The Canadian author’s two favourite ‘natural’ methods for dispatching his victims are drowning and freezing, drowning being preferred by poets—probably because it can be used as a metaphor for a descent into the unconscious—and freezing by prose writers. Why this should be so is evident if you think about the other methods made available by the actual environment. There is lots of water and snow in Canada, and both are good murder weapons; but other plausible weapons are few. There are no deserts and no jungles.”

She goes on to say there aren’t many poisonous reptiles here either, and then lists a few of the better known “natural” deaths in CanLit. (The most famous is probably Earle Birney’s long poem “David”, even though it doesn’t fit exactly either. Evidence, I think, that she wants readers to toy with these ideas themselves.) For every classic example, I could easily think of a more recent corollary. (But I can’t say them, without spoiling! because they all revolve around a character’s death—often suddenly and brutally!)

ANIMAL VICTIMS: CHAPTER THREE

“That’s the key: English animal stories are about ‘social relations’, American ones are about people killing animals; Canadian ones are about animals being killed, as felt emotionally from inside the fur and feathers. As you can see, Moby-Dick as told by the White Whale would be very different. (‘Why is this strange man chasing me around with a harpoon?’)”

I wonder if this is why I have become so inordinately affected by the plight of animals in stories! Although I did not grow up reading the Canadian animal stories that MA lists; I read them after I read Survival for the first time: after we were living in Toronto and exploring the parklands named for—and featured in—some of them. They are, as she warns, tragic: their echoes reverberate in other stories, decades later.)

MY THOUGHTS: On this reread, I find it interesting to think about the little I’ve read of Australian literature, how it aligns and diverges, with this colonial perspective on CanLit. I think about how Sybylla and Anne fit together (and don’t). I think about a pair of characters stranded on a desert road, how one of them perishes. And I think of the deaths of dingos and the hunting of a turtle and the drowning of a cat (told from without, in the “American tradition”) but also a book titled for and told from a dog’s perspective (which I’ve not read) would seems to fit the Canadian tradition posited.

It’s also the first time I’ve read the book since Graeme Gibson died, so it’s interesting to see how prominently his work features in discussions about whether/how Canadians chose to set their books in Canada (his are set in southwestern Ontario towns, in the tradition of Robertson Davies—who has a character die from being hit by a snowball!—but with Gibson’s madcap, avant-garde style). When Survival was published, MA was still married to Jim Polk; she began dating Graeme Gibson in 1973.

I’m curious whether any of the Canadian books you have read resonate with the ideas in these three chapters (or, don’t). I’m thinking of internationally acclaimed novels like Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion (set overtop one of the ravines in which so many of those animal stories were set) and the way that nature presses into Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel on the west coast, with the drowning death of one character; but, then, I also think about the desert scrubland in Miriam Toews’s Women Talking (Mexico, not Canada) and the nail salon in Souvankham Thammavongsa’s Pick a Colour (which could be anywhere).

So now you know a little about how Survival came to be, and how it begins. The rest of the chapters are shorter and I’ve already read the fourth. Have you started to read for MARM yet?

Novembers for readers online are often busy months.

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!

In a year with some extended reading projects and some very long novels, it’s been a treat to have some shorter (and, sometimes, simpler) stories like these, in the stacks. Come November (just a few days away), you might be looking to add some novellas like these to your stacks—with #NovNov, hosted by Cathy and Rebecca, in mind.

Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti (2015) is one of those rapid-immersion novellas, the first in her trilogy of the same name. Readers are plunged into a moment of change for its heroine, as she leaves behind everything she’s known, in order to honour her people by being the first of them to attend Oomza University, worlds away. “‘Tribal’: that’s what they called humans from ethnic groups too remote and ‘uncivilized’ to regularly send students to attend Oomza Uni.”

A phrase or a single modifier is all the explanation given to situate us in custom and habit, so that we can appreciate Binti’s sense of dislocation, without fully understanding her culture’s history and legacy. Only when the story is nearly over, does anyone make clear statements as to the political underpinnings of this coming-of-age story: an older girl transforming into a young woman, capable of even more than she’d previously dreamed.

“He was angry and always speaking out about the way my people were maltreated by the Khoush majority despite the fact that they needed us and our astrolabes to survive. He as always calling them eviel, though he’d never traveled to a Khoush country or known a Khoush. His anger was rightful, but all that he said was from what he didn’t truly know.”

The follow-ups are Home (2018) and The Night Masquerade (2019). Each volume won the Hugo for Best Novella in its respective year, and Binti also claimed the Nebula.

In 2024, I read the third in Nghi Vo’s Singing Hills cycle, and I quite liked it, but I wholly enjoyed When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain (2020). Because it’s a cycle, one can begin reading at any point, but I’m happy that I met the story-collector cleric, Chih, when they were doing more travelling than sitting.

Now, Chih’s neixin (their sassy note-taker recorder bird, Almost Brilliant) is at home, sitting on some eggs, and we meet Si-yu and her mammoth, Piluk. In Almost Brilliant’s absence, there is no other perspective on the tales told here, other than Chih’s and a tiger’s—there’s a delightful back-and-forth, with the tiger’s refrain being how sad it is that humans must tell stories with such a slant when, alternatively, they could say how things happened.

“Neither ghosts nor bandits would bother two people on a mammoth, however, and anyway, Chih had never been on a mammoth before. What was the point of being a Singing Hills cleric if they didn’t get to ride a mammoth when the opportunity arose?”

One previous book is The Empress of Salt and Fortune (2020) and the three follow-ups are Mammoths at the Gates (2023), The Brides of High Hill (2025), A Mouthful of Dust (2025) and, new this year, A Long and Speaking Silence (2026).

I dragged my heels reading Banana Yoshimoto’s Moshi Moshi (2010; Trans. Asa Yoneda, 2016) because I think it’s the last of her books in translation: now I will have to either reread or learn Japanese. It was a fitting conclusion to the arc, a story about grief and how a mother and daughter cope in the wake of their father and husband’s death. In her usual spare and stark style, the women confront his absence in different ways, and there are some diversions (as with the daughter’s waitressing work) which also bring out new facets of character and theme.

At times I have fallen into the spaces between her words and felt wholly unmoved; at the right time, I find her stories rich—and, even, profound. It was the right time for me to read Moshi Moshi, on a very humid summer night stuck indoors with fire warnings blazing across the map.

“It had happened, and there was nothing to be done about that. There were plenty of people in the world who’d been through far worse. It had come as a huge shock to me because it had been so far out of the normal flow of things until then, but it wasn’t out of the realm of things that were possible in this world.”

Robert Seethaler’s The Last Movement (2020; Trans. Charlotte Collins) taps a similar vein, but with a titch more sentimentality. It landed in my stack with Susan’s recommendation. (And perhaps other readers too? His covers seem so familiar.) As a music student in high school, our final exam one year was to be able to identify pieces of music at random as our teacher played them, including as many relevant details as possible—if not the specific piece and composer—and every week we reviewed. Mahler was trouble for me; I routinely guessed him when I shouldn’t and overlooked him when I should.

A story like Seethaler’s would have brought Mahler off the page for me. Measured and clear throughout, the element of the story that stayed with me resided in an observer: I love the idea that even a casual encounter can ripple outwards and affect a meaningful change. But I wonder if I might not prefer another of his books.

“Sitting on the sundeck, Mahler contemplated the meaninglessness of life with a twinge of baleful resignation. Life was little more than a brief exhalation, a breath in the storm of the world, yet he loved it so much that his sadness at the futility of this love almost broke his heart.”

Conor Kerr’s Beaver Hills Forever (2025) was a must-read for me because his debut collection of linked stories, Avenue of Champions (reviewed for World Literature Today), stood out straightaway, and his first novel Prairie Edge did not disappoint either (it was eventually listed for that year’s Giller Prize). He’s also written two collections of poetry: An Explosion of Feathers (2021) and Old Gods (2023).

Beaver Hills Forever is a little like all the elements of his craft exploded: the rotating voices of four key characters (with a similar resonance to his stories), the themes of belonging and how we are judged as fitting and misfitting—by others and ourselves—and how the rub grinds us down or creates a spark (similar to his novel), in sharply observed scenes and inner musings that are sometimes lyrical and often precise. I flagged so many passages to share, and just thinking back to this read makes me smile, but it seems rude to interrupt this Métis/Ukrainian writer’s steady build of characterisation and connection, so here’s his beginning instead.

Aho,
Buddy can drop a bead on the sunrise
Stitch that right back up if he wanted
But really he just wants to see his kids
It’s been a few weeks, up here in camp.
Kids back with their mom in the city
Good lady that hate the way he couldn’t
Fulfill a promise to not end up like all the others

(For more of the Beaver Hills, in what’s called Alberta today, check out Dwayne Donald’s short recording via Indigenous Literary Studies, about how we can connect with the Earth and with one another. All the other novellas discussed here are from the Big presses, but this book by Conor Kerr is published by indie press Arsenal Pulp on what’s today the west coast of Canada.)

Pictured alongside are some of the novellas I’ve enjoyed this year, and I’ve also just started one by Joyce Carol Oates. Looking ahead to #NovNov, a few others stacked here to tempt me next month too.

How about you: any outstanding novellas in your recent reading?

So, if you’re keeping track of my travels in women’s writing in the 17^th and 18^th centuries, we have had Rebecca Romney writing about them in Jane Austen’s Bookshelf and Dale Spender in Mothers of the Novel, as well as Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) and Delarivier Manley’s The Adventures of Rivella (1714).

Now Eliza Haywood (c.1693-1756), who was working in the same vein as her predecessors. Even called out with them, by Alexander Pope’s disparaging verse “Corinna”, which was directed at the women who had picked up their pens to write (their work now serious competition for the fellas, both in print and on the stage).

Love in Excess was originally published in three volumes in 1719—the same year as Robinson Crusoe—and it was a bestseller too. So popular was she that, during the 1720s, she was writing a novel every three months on average. Each of the volumes is about as long as Oroonoko—which is to say, not very—but there is no justification of it (as being true to life, as having been witnessed by the author, or any of that) and it reads more like a romance.

But a romance with some spice and some excitement (more than one would guess). The convention of the time dictated that a woman who demonstrated her affection for a man, who had not previously and explicitly and formally outlined his intention to woo her, was undeniably immoral. But here we have two women smitten with Count D’elmont, and social expectations overwritten by desire.

Everyone loves D’elmont, but D’elmont’s got eyes for only one woman. (David Oakleaf, in his introduction to the Broadview Press edition of this novel, suggests that through the character of D’elmont, Haywood raises all sorts of questions about how women and men typically behave in other “amatory” fiction. Think: Pamela. But he notes that Haywood’s also concerned with how ambition impacts women’s relationships with one another in their pursuit of a man, not only with the subordinate role afforded to women in society.)

“Every word she spoke, was like a dagger to D’elmont’s heart; yet he so artfully managed his endeavors, between the authority of the guardian, and the entreaties of a friend, that she was at last overcome. Tis hard for the severest virtue to deny themselves the sight of the person beloved, and whatever resolutions we make, there are but few, who like [So-and-So] might not by such a lover, be prevailed upon to break them.”

There is an inappropriate letter of declaration, an interrupted secret meeting after dark, and someone gets threatened with being sentenced to a convent. And THEN, things get exciting. Almost too exciting.

New characters emerge—some as go-betweens and some as new love interests. Everyone has so many feelings, and they’re all over the place. There are complicated machinations, and it’s hard to tell whose intent to play match-maker is authentic from who’s simply striving in their own interest.

(Where the narrative diverged in Behn’s novel, as when it becomes more of a travelogue—with geographical and cultural details—here a couple of characters have their backstories inserted in such a way as to offer different understandings of another key character. As though Haywood is content to lay all her eggs in the romance basket: no edifying content required.)

“But whatever dominion, honor and virtue may have over our waking thoughts, it is certain that they fly from the closed eyes; our passions then exert their forceful power, and that which is most predominant in the soul, agitates the fancy, and brings even things impossible to pass. Desire, with watchful diligence repelled, returns with greater violence in unguarded sleep, and overthrows the vain efforts of day.”

It’s very dramatic (from a dagger to talk of dominion), but it does make sense (as much sense as a story about feelings can make). It’s clear Haywood had a plan for her story and, regardless of how quickly she wrote it, it’s cohesive and exciting (and perhaps the work of modern editors helped by standardising the language). And her connections to the theatre world also seem to have boosted her public profile and popularity after this early success.

But I enjoyed a shorter work of hers even more: Fantomina, originally published in 1725 but freshly reprinted by Renard Press in the U.K. (with a helpful introduction by three scholars who are knowledgeable enough to make it all sound simple: Creel, Qualls, and Sagal). I urge you to peruse their Classic reprints: a curious and enticing selection. (And shipping to Canada? Both reasonable and responsive.)

In Fantomina, a young woman (whose aunt isn’t paying close enough attention) decides to act the part of a prostitute to see if she can draw the attention of Beauplaisir. The experiment requires far more acting than she anticipated, and she seems to learn a great deal, about the lengths to which she will go in pursuit of this relationship and the lengths to which he will go—first, in pursuit of her, but then, in an attempt to avoid responsibility.

What I found most interesting was how modern some of her concerns seem. In her initial disguise, she notes that “… the Knowledge of her Birth would not have influenc’d him with Respect sufficient to have curb’d the wild Exuberance of his luxurious Wishes, or made him in that longing,–that impatient Moment, change the Form of his Addresses.”

And if you’re reading between those lines, Exuberance translates into, well, secretion. Ahem. But, don’t worry: she’s got “no Apprehensions of any Amorous Violence but where she wish’d to find it” and there’s a plan in the works to expose his violent behaviour (ok, so you were right to worry). But saying more would be spoilery. Quoting the introduction: “Agency, liberation and the boundaries of sexual contact remain just as pertinent today as during Haywood’s lifetime.”

My interest in early women writers stretches back, but in recent years I lost the habit of reading classics. The past two years, I’ve kept a single classic in my hefty stack and it’s made it easier for me to settle into sentences with nearly as many commas as words, and dialogue and longer chapters (not usually all at once).

What’s kept an early 18thC-writer in my stack all year is Bill’s ongoing determination to reach a conclusion in identifying the first novel; his official exploration launches in January, and simply attaching a date to certain reading plans helps me focus when there’s an endless TBR that appeals.

In the process of anticipating Bill’s project, he and Reese have convinced me that Tom Jones is essential—just in general, not in that quest—but there are thirty years between Love in Excess and Tom Jones, so I’m edging towards that.

Next, I’ll write about the two Penelope Aubin novels I’ve read. Only one Ontario public library has her circulating in print, but for those who can read online more easily, there are reproductions online at Internet Archive.

After that, I hope my explorations will take a route something like this:

Francoise de Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Peruvienne (1747)
Sarah Fielding’s The Governess (1749)
Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749)
Eliza Haywood’s The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751)
Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote (1752)
Frances Sheridan’s The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Bidulph (1761) Reread
Unca Eliza Winkfield’s The Female American (1767)
Fanny Burney’s Evelina (1778)
Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story (1791)
Charlotte Smith’s The Old Manor House (1793)
Hannah Foster’s The Coquette, The Boarding School (1799)

In ranking from least scary and spooky to most, here are some stories that suit the dusk-comes-early evenings we’ve been having, with cooler temperatures and a whole lot of damp.

First, Cherie Dimaline’s Funeral Songs for Dying Girls (2023), which includes glimpses of nighttime tours of haunted spaces in the city (i.e. pretend ghosts with a stake in perpetuating beliefs in these hauntings) with Win’s actual experience growing up on the grounds of the cemetery that her dad manages (i.e. connections with Indigenous ancestors). She’s in high school now, and reconciled to her strange relationship with what’s dead and gone (including her mother), and what remains and endures after a loss. The other kids in her class ditch on a field trip to the museum, but she is in her element, surrounded by “old stuff, dead stuff, and things that were used and held years ago”.

While reading about the cemetery, I pictured The Necropolis, which is the sort that begs the word ‘charming’ and then leaves you uncomfortable about that. But Win won me over, the way she plays with numbers (and puts them into orderly states, when her world gets jittery), her sassy take on things, and the way that Dimaline allows her to be tender (o-c-c-a-s-i-o-n-a-l-l-y) without ever crossing into sentimentality. [Note: I wanted to read another of her books after she was awarded the Neustadt Prize earlier this year, and this was a good choice.]

“This wasn’t the last time things got heated on the grounds; over the years there were the make-out sessions during visiting hours, teenagers jumping the fence at night to grope between the monuments, and the behind-the-chapel humping squeezed in between funerals and wakes. Dad said it was because grief did funny things to people, but I knew it was because people were just basically assholes.”

Only a smidge more unsettling is Eden Royce’s novella Psychopomp & Circumstance (2025) which seems to be her first book for adult readers.

Phaedra is twenty-one years old when she agrees to manage her Aunt Cleo’s affairs— her “homegoing”—following her death. Only when Phee’s travelling alone to her Aunt’s home does she reflect on how unusual it is that she’s never visited there alone before; her own parents still think of her as a child, and her Aunt Cleo was estranged from the rest of the family for reasons that Phee only partly understands.

So when it comes to her Aunt’s affairs, she’s confronted with a lot to manage in a literal sense—not having lived or moved independently through the world in general.

But also with some unexpected matters swirling around the veil between the worlds. It’s a gently told story, as much as that can be true when matters of mortality are under scrutiny, and when there is a room in a house with no door to access it.

“As she went, she turned on lamps in anticipation of the coming darkness. Instead of cutting through the gathering gloom, the lamps glowed with a tender illumination that called shadows closer. They stretched along the walls, arching high and long above, around her.”

For another reader, Lauren Carter’s The Longest Night (2025) might not fit into this list; her fiction and poetry straddle the line between beautiful and haunting.

But this book gave me that feeling you get when you dream about waking up, and you go back to sleep in your dream and, then, have to struggle to the surface of consciousness like you can’t catch your breath to truly wake yourself up For Reals.

That feeling scares me, and that’s the feeling I had the whole time I was reading her third novel. So, for me? Scarier than cemeteries and corpses. From another perspective, there’s nothing otherworldly about this story: it feels real, it feels like it could happen to you. (The others here are from big publishers, but this is from Canadian indie, Freehand Books, based in Calgary, Alberta.)

“She tries to resist, but as if it were a real rainbow made only of water droplets splitting light, her hand has no power to push it away. Quickly, the tea is in her mouth, sinking fast, through the thin skin of her tongue—I remember once licking the post of the chain-link fence around the playground, that sensation of being held fast, then the sharphard pull, and pain—into her blood.”

Never Whistle at Night, a 2023 collection of dark short stories (edited by Shane Hawk and Theodore C. Van Alst Jr), is not only a consistently good representation of short fiction, but a great introduction to Indigenous writers for those who are looking to expand their TBRs. From the opening tale, you quickly have a sense that there might be some figures from Indigenous legend to scare you, but it’s just as likely that there will be badly behaved humans.

There is a debate of sorts in the introduction, over what’s horror and what’s psychological fiction and what’s simply good storytelling (where talk of an essential category dissolves into a broader discussion about human behaviour), that got me thinking. And, of the writers I already knew (thirteen of the twenty-six), I particularly enjoyed Kelli Jo Ford’s “Heart-Shaped Clock” and, of the new-to-me writers, I was left most curious about Amber Blaeser-Wardzala’s “Collections”. Beware: some scary stuff!

“A drop of sweat rolled across Peter’s temple and drenched his ear canal. He thumbed it, attempting to push the cold drop of sweat away from his eardrum. He was unsuccessful. The scarce plant life was brittle, the water on their stems having turned to vapor under the relentless sun. This burning hot day gave way for our ancestors to get even. (Beginning of D.H. Trujillo’s “Snakes are Born in the Dark”)

Contents: Twenty-six stories, beginning with Mathilda Zellers’ “Kushtuka” and ending with Waubgeshig Rice’s “Limbs”

And, finally, a 2025 flip book from Blackfeet writer Stephen Graham Jones, which contains two independent novels: The Babysitter Lives and Killer on the Road. This is full-on horror territory, and even if you’ve only dabbled in the genre, you will recognise the tropes. It’s Jones’s speciality: knowing where all the beats land, inside and out. With  the emphasis on the insides.

He’s in the know, so you’re in the know; and it’s comfortable, you feel like you’ve been invited someplace you’ve been before; except it’s like you wanted to refuse the invitation, only you couldn’t; and now, you just stick around, watching it happen, unable to look away. It’s winning, this dance between formula and subversion (the babysitter, for instance, she’s just as super smart as his other teenaged heroines) and even when I’ve thought I mightn’t finish a book by SGJ, I can’t seem to stop myself. (I’m reading another right now!)

“Charlotte gasps reaches forward for the anchor the water heater can be—anything, please, even that—but the water heater’s not there. She sucks a mouthful of this thick air, screams it back out, sure she’s falling, sure she’s drowning, sure there’s nothing real to breathe, here, and reaching up for the tights covering her eyes, she realizes she’s not holding  Desi’s hand anymore.”

Where are you on the spectrum of creepy reading for this season? Do you find yourself more or less inclined towards spooky stories in 2026 than in other years?

Soon after this season’s year was announced, finding nothing published in 1949 in the local library, I logged onto the Internet Archive and, at first, found only a few options.

One of them was an exhibition catalogue of Palestinian artifacts held in Toronto that year, which included a compact history lesson that felt so urgent, so relevant, that I read it straight through.  It was seemingly staple-bound, about 60 pages long, with black-and-white illustrations, which was also interesting, as today’s exhibition catalogues are so fancy: hardcovered and glossy-paged.

I looked for it again this week, but no luck. I did, however, find other publications which create an interesting picture of life in Canada in 1949:

• The Annual Toronto February 1949 Shorthorn Sale: Exhibition Grounds Cattle Grounds, Toronto, Ontario (many goodlooking cows and steers herein);
• Talking about Unions: Woodsworth House, Toronto, December 1949. Via the Women’s Conference on Organized Labour, (a reminder that women’s role in the wartime workforce created new opportunities); and the
• Court Report of Investigation into the Circumstances Attending the Loss of the S. S. Noronic in Toronto Harbour September 17, 1949 (regarding the deaths of more than a hundred passengers in an early morning blaze).

A few months ago, I visited the second-hand shop, where I found two novels (including John O’Hara’s and Elizabeth Goudge’s) which I added to two from my own shelves, as a small stack of potentials for this week’s reading. But neither of them suited my mood at the beginning of the month: O’Hara’s reads like a cross between dos Passos and Metallious, and Goudge’s like a cross between Jean Plaidy and Anya Seton.

In other moods, either could have been a match. But the days were slipping past, and I started to think, well, maybe a short story by Jean Stafford (“Children are Bored on Sunday”) would be the only viable choice.

But, Stafford can be so unsettling, I thought, so I picked up Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski (1915-1988). In my mind I had muddled it with another Persephone reprint, Miss Ranskill Comes Home, so you can see that I thought a story about a woman who finds herself alone on a desert island was my only hope for a lighter-than-Stafford story this event.

For me, the most interesting characters were a laundress (Mme. Quilleboeuf in the town of A—) and a Mother Superior at an orphanage there, who have each been positioned differently during hard times. As in her other novels, including To Bed with Grand Music (1946) and The Victorian Chaise-longue (1953), Laski’s women are complex and multi-faceted characters, who are always believable and not always likeable (who among us is ALWAYS likeable anyhow).

All of the characters are believable enough to carry readers through a gruelling and complicated process; the story is compelling right to the last page.

And it was an added bonus to have been reading it alongside the third volume in Olivia Manning’s The Fortunes of War (also about WWII) and Tove Jansson’s The Moomins and the Great Flood, which was written during the war. Jansson’s author’s note begins: “It was the winter of war, in 1939. One’s work stood still; it felt completely pointless to try to create pictures.” But then, in 1945, Jansson picked up her half-written story, in response to a friend’s prodding, and she captured that time in pen and ink and paint. Just like Laski and so many others have done.

This week’s #1949Club is hosted by Stuck in a Book and Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings. Thanks you two, for taking my reading in unexpected directions. Even when I don’t make a good decision for good reasons, there’s often a good book in the end!