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| A salon-ish bunch of chairs? Well, we were probably looking at the view, but notice the books piled at the side. |
Where I Was
We are fortunate enough to own a primitive cabin in Northern Ontario. When we bought the land it was at the edge of Killarney Provincial Park; now it's completely surrounded by the park. You have to paddle in to get to it, and our only neighbours on the lake are two primitive backwoods campsites that folks canoe in to.
People have cottages, cabins, or camps in Ontario. It's a cottage if you're actually close to Toronto. If you're north of the French River (as we are) it's known as a camp, so that's what we are.
A full view of our splendiferous residence:
The sort of thing we see in the neighbourhood:
Fleet week at the cabin:
Bookish
The camp is way off-grid. There's no cell phone coverage, and the power is supplied by those solar panels hanging off the front. All of which makes it a good place for uninterrupted reading and while we were up there last week, I did read a few books:
Rebecca Makkai/I Have Some Questions For You
Her most recent novel; it came out earlier this year. I have to say I wanted to like this better than I did. It's OK. A prep-school murder mystery, which sounded appealing. Makkai is connected to the Chicago area, important for me, though this story has been transferred to New Hampshire. I thought it skilled enough, but it felt programmatic. She wants to say something about the rush to judgment, Twitter mobs and the facile propensity to convict Black men, but then our protagonist does rush to judgment, and her judgment, about her former music teacher, is a little wrong, but is basically reaffirmed as correct. Hmmph.
James Huneker/Unicorns
Huneker was an American newspaper critic--mainly classical music and literature for the Philadelphia and New York papers--who died in 1922. I've read a bunch of his books and am maybe a bit obsessed. This one is from 1916, and is the last collection of essays that came out during his life. He reviews A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man when it comes out. (That young James Joyce is a promising author--Dubliners was brilliant--and we expect great things of him in the future. Or so says Mr. Huneker.) Like any collection of incidental writings, it's uneven; there were several fine things, though: a couple of essays on J.-K. Huysmans; Huneker's first trip to Paris, where he went to study piano at the Conservatoire, and may have seen Franz Liszt; a trip up in an airplane.
Anita Brookner/Hotel du Lac
Won the Booker for 1984 and is pretty great. But you probably already knew that.
