One of the downsides of living in Toronto is that leaves turn colour later than in the surrounding countryside. Also, we don't usually have that many stretches of trees, aside from going over the Don Valley. But we do have street trees that change colour.
Also, I bought a burning bush. It didn't turn the vibrant red I was hoping for. As fall began, it started out as more of a dusty plum colour.
Though later the red came out slightly more.
I'll just have to hope that by next fall, it has absorbed more nutrients or whatever it takes for the base colour to be red in the first place.
Somewhat ironically, I have another small bush that was more red than the burning bush.
And here are some other interesting fall colours in the front yard.
All in all, a decent fall, though it is already getting quite chilly (a bit too soon for my taste) and it will be snowing before we know it.*
Ok, on to the literature. With a few exceptions (such as Mary McCarthy's Birds of America, which I am slowly working my way through and some of the stories in Julian Barnes's Pulse), I really have not enjoyed much of the fiction I've read since basically the summer. This includes the frankly terrible Far from the Madding Crowd, and the quite disappointing The Death of My Brother Abel and Faulkner's A Fable. I thought the writing in Didion's Play It As It Lays was fine, but got a bit bored by the characters' endless ennui. While slight, Kawakami Ms. Ice Sandwich was not bad, though I was through with it in a day.
To some extent, that is just the luck of the draw. Speaking of luck (or at least chance), I did enjoy Paul Auster's Moon Palace. This is a book I owned forever (since just after undergrad) but must have lost in a book purging, so I replaced it a while back and finally read it. Some readers didn't like just how many outrageous coincidences there were in the book. I didn't mind that so much. You know you'll probably get such things in an Auster novel. Interestingly, this was a completely straight narrative (though some stories within stories). There were no postmodern touches at all.
I've tried to arrange the reading list so the next few months will be a bit less grueling. I'm pretty sure I'll enjoy rereading DeLillo's White Noise. Then I'll be tackling Updike's Rabbit novels. Then it's all the way back to the classics, reading Homer and Virgil's The Aeneid in a few different translations. But then I am going to try to read Montaigne's Essays. If I am not enjoying them, I'll set them aside for a while. (Given that I wasn't all that taken by the randomness of Tokarczuk's Flights, I've decided to postpone Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet for a few months.) At some point, either very late Dec. or early Jan., I want to tackle Musil's The Man Without Qualities. However, I do have a sinking suspicion that this is going to be a tough nut to crack (and certainly to actually enjoy!), and it doesn't help that the tome appears to be too heavy to really read on the commute in (even when split into two volumes). I guess I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
Fairly shortly after Musil, I will "reward" myself for getting through it by rereading Powers' Morte d'Urban. This was a novel (about a priest who finds humility in a rural parish in Minnesota) that I found surprisingly moving, given my general indifference or occasional outright hostility to religion. At any rate, I am curious to find if I feel the same way about the novel and its protagonist now.
* Indeed, it snowed a fair bit this afternoon, making the evening commute a real mess, even for people on transit. I guess I'll have to break out the boots. I should have gone to the gym tonight, but just couldn't face going back out in that weather. But obviously I'll have to toughen up and soon. Otherwise, all this will have been in vain if I gain back all the weight I lost this year.
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