Efforts have been made to make February more palatable, but there’s no getting around the fact that the month, its relative shortness and occasional leaps notwithstanding, is a slog. If you don’t have the coin to escape to sunnier climes, then consider easing yourself through these final weeks with a bask under your reading lamp’s gentle rays; perhaps with…
… a modern classic
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, Italo Calvino
Admittedly a bit of a bait and switch. The Italian writer’s 1979 meta novel – inspired by his association with the geeky 1960s French collective Oulipo, which sought to “expand” literature by imposing various pseudo-scientific constraints on it – has little to do with winter (unless you count the actual word “winter” as it appears in the title of its book-within-a-book). Calvino’s novel is, in part, a non-linear, fragmented reflection on the art of reading, so if your ideal for a winter’s day involves holing up with either a puzzle or a book you can get a twofer here.
If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino.Supplied
… some cold-blooded murder
Clara at the Door with the Revolver: The Scandalous Black Suspect, the Exemplary White Son, and the Murder That Shocked Toronto, Carolyn Whitzman
Clara at the Door With a Revolver by Carolyn Whitzman.Supplied
Whitzman’s book, just out, brings to light a unique case in the annals of Canadian criminal history involving one Clara Ford, a cross-dressing Black tailor who was accused of the shocking 1894 murder – grist for the tabloids of the day – of the scion of a wealthy white Toronto family. Ford initially confessed, but then recanted, citing police coercion. When she testified on her own behalf, she became the first woman, and only the second person, to do so in a Canadian trial. More remarkably, she prevailed: convincing a jury of 12 white men of her innocence.
… something Oscar-related
Women Talking, Miriam Toews
Women Talking by Miriam Toews.Supplied
If part of your Oscar prep involves reading the books behind the best picture nominees, then you’ve got relatively light work (albeit weighty, subject-wise) ahead of you: Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front and Miriam Toews’s Women Talking, whose film version is directed by fellow Canadian Sarah Polley. (There’s no book of Top Gun: Maverick, mercifully.) From potentially static material – female members of a South American Mennonite community engaging in a series of existential dialogues related to their sexual abuse by the men – Toews extracts a sense of urgency, and, more surprisingly, humour.
… a history, with relevance to current geopolitics
Kingdom of Characters, Jing Tsu
Kingdom of Characters by Jing Tsu.Supplied
Everyone wants insights into the “weather”-balloon-wielding, minority-ethnic-group-oppressing, citizen-surveilling Middle Kingdom these days. For a primer on China’s rise to economic superpower you could pick up Joanna Chiu’s excellent China Unbound from 2021. For a different angle, consider this account (originally published in February of last year and new out in paperback) by a Yale professor of East Asian studies about the colourful individuals who undertook the daunting task of modernizing China’s ancient ideographic language.
… something set in a warmer hemisphere
The Sun Walks Down, Fiona McFarlane
The Sun Walks Down by Fiona McFarlane.Supplied
Lost-child narratives have been bound up with the Australian outback ever since a po-faced Meryl Streep channelled Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton in the 1988 movie A Cry in the Dark. The Sydney-born McFarlane, winner of the Guardian First Book Award and Dylan Thomas Prize for her two previous novels, gives the genre a new take in this epic, 19th-century-set novel told through a multitude of voices – none of them a dingo – about the week-long search for a young boy who wanders off the family farm during a dust storm.
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