summer reading part two

Sundog Rising!

Reflections on living the life literary by the Urban Sundog

Summer Reading Part Two: In With Ten Days to Spare!

A few weeks back, I wrote my So What’s A Good Book to Read This Summer? entry. In which I lamented that I hadn’t been able to put together a good summer reading list this year. I ended the bit by saying I was putting my faith in The Emperor of Ocean Park, by Stephen L. Carter, which I had picked up in hard cover for 80 cents in a secondhand bookstore. And that I would write further, to say how that worked out for me …

Well, The Emperor was a terrific read, which I strongly recommend. But was it a great summer read? Providing that extra dimension of oneness with the season a truly hot summer book always manages?

Unfortunately, not so much.

To be honest, the summer wasn’t what it could have been this year in Winnipeg. We came off the worst winter in recorded history. And in Winnipeg, that’s really saying something. And it never really did get hot this year. It sort of felt more like an extended spring than summer at all. And now we’re moving into fall …

Add to that some personal frustrations with life in general, and it wasn’t a prime time for reading.

Then, finally, my wife and I went for a holiday last week, spending five days in the Whiteshell Provincial Park on the Manitoba/Ontario border, and it all came together! Not so much weatherwise — in fact we even had frost one night. But the summer state of mind finally arrived, and with it an appropriate summer novel. Defining to me that the missing quality in my reading to date so far this season was “delight”.

Our plan was to recharge. All we had on the agenda was sleeping, eating, reading, hiking, and taking pictures. If we did anything more than that on any of the five days, we’d be overachieving. And those five activities were precisely what we managed to fill our days with.

The hiking and picture taking were wonderful, as we covered some twenty kilometres of the Canadian Shield on foot. The eating was good, as we had a barbecue tossed in as part of the rental, and the beds were perfectly comfortable.

The difference between a serious and an amateur photographer.

We drove 265 kilometres, hiked another kilometre through the bush, went half a kilometre down a relatively inaccessible beach so my wife could find a spider web in a hole in the rocks no human had ever seen before to take a picture of. I pointed and shot her doing it.

And finally I found the right book for my missing summer read.

The surprising thing about the title finally is that it was a re-read, not a new read.

Both my wife and I are huge fans of Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series, which to date includes The Eyre Affair, Lost in a Good Book, The Well of Lost Plots, Something Rotten, First Among Sequels, One of Our Thursdays Is Missing, and The Woman Who Died A Lot. It’s been some years since I started reading the books, and quite frankly, I know of no author who throws more brilliant ideas at you per page than Jasper Fforde. I read One Of Our Thursdays Is Missing eight or so years after I first read The Eyre Affair, and quite frankly, things had grown so complex by then I couldn’t always place what he was talking about well enough to really appreciate the novel.

My wife led the way, rereading the entire series just before I bought The Woman Who Died A Lot so it flowed properly for her. I decided I needed to do the same thing, and on a whim, threw The Eyre Affair in my luggage at the last moment as we packed to go.

What a great bit of lit serendipity!

The weather might have been cool, but once I got into the book, I knew I had to sit out on our lakeside porch and enjoy it in a proper outdoor maybe-not-so-summery-reading-session, but datewise, I was still in the season. And it all came together for me. The utter delight and sheer creativity of the novel mixing with the outdoors in someplace I should have been earlier this summer, obviously, but hey better late than never.

So — no doubt about it. Number One Summer Read for me in 2014: The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde.

But I can’t wait until next summer to read Lost In A Good Book, or I’ll lose the thread of the ongoing story again. I’ll just have to fit in six more good reads in the next six months or so. And I hear there might even be a seventh in the works …

***************

REALITY FICTION AND BEYOND!

This week:

Continuing The Twitchy Gal with Chapter Eleven posted on Monday and Chapter Twelve coming on Friday, September 19th at:

http://realficone.blogspot.ca/

Finally! It all comes together to reveal why this novel is the official sequel to Reality Fiction One …