And just in time for me going on vacation, too. I'm hoping a lot of my plans this week will just be "read in park"

Just Finished

The Burglar in the Closet — Lawrence Block

@swizzard recommended this one and I liked it. It's jokey, so I wouldn't want to read to many in this series back-to-back but I think I'll end up grabbing more of these from the library. Burglar accidentally witnesses a murder is a great premise and I think this followed through on it well.

Small Ceremonies — Carol Shields

I like this, although I think not quite as much as I enjoyed Swann. Oddly for a first book, I regret not saving this book specifically because there is a bunch going on that I think I just don't have the background knowledge of her as an author to appreciate. Heads up, the next few paragraphs are going to talk about specifics in plot & theme. This doesn't feel like a book one could 'spoil'.

Carol Shields is very directly a character in this book but I think I should actually be reading her as being several characters in this book (for all I know, all of them). Straightforwardly, the narrator, Judith, is an academic author writing a biography on Susanna Moodie. Carol Shields' biography on Moodie comes out the same year as this book does. I don't know enough to know whether she too has been struggling in her attempt to write a novel or if she viewed her biography as a fallback position but it certainly feels possible. Likewise, the way the narrator consistently cuts down both colleagues and herself feels like it could line up.

It doesn't seem like much of the specifics of Furlong line up, I don't know enough about her previously published poetry to know if might be read as being Canadiana to the point of pastiche, but his big secret being that he's actually an American author is... interesting.

Likewise, I don't know how much of Shields is in Spalding. Did she see herself as this literary genius that the world failed to recognize (or publish)?

I know it doesn't sound like I have good reason to wonder if these characters are also Shields in a more meaningful way than her having written them. But both of them have written books that imply it.

Spalding's first published book, which is coming out in the close of this book, is 'based on' (it is implied to be a full-on roman à clef) based on letters Judith's son sent to Spalding's daughter. while it cannot be literally the book Small Ceremonies, it is this book but passed through multiple levels of reinterpretation.

Furlong's newest published book, Graven Images, is indirectly the focus of this entire novel, and it has gone through the same process of multiple-reinterpretation. Furlong, having suffered a long bout of writers block, plagiarizes his book from a draft novel Judith gave him as a student in his creative writing class. Judith is not the original author though. While suffering a bout of writer's block in Furlong's class, she plagiarizes the plot from Spalding's first unpublished novel. It is left as an open question where Spalding got the idea from.

The punchline (and the novel's catharsis) is that he is unable to even recognize that Graven Images is his own story reworked. Which suggests that I shouldn't care whether I can see Shields in Furlong or Spalding (or her husband, Martin). If they're her they also aren't because they've been reinterpreted until they became something new. Maybe to wonder to much on the specifics is to fall into the "X things you didn't know about Y" fact-collecting of art is to miss the point entirely.

Anyway, this book is good.

Now Reading

Around the World in Eighty Days

Still reading this. I think I'll aim for 'catching up' to where I am in the race each weekend. I can't believe Passpartout would talk to cops. Not me in 80 days.

Orientalism — Edward Said

I finished the middle third today. It's been a bit slower reading because it focuses heavily on a lot of writers that I don't have first-hand knowledge of. Still good and still making points that feel like they could have been written yesterday.

The Strangers — Katherena Vermette

It's local author time. I've only just started this but it's a direct sequel to a previous novel of hers, The Break. That book was a good but hard read and this one is shaping up to be much the same. I'll save thoughts on it for next week when I've finished it