The White Road (Tania Hershman) + The Year of Fog (Michelle Richmond)

one of the things these mountain days brought is: having time to read. even though i read a lot of stories and books in the last weeks and months, it's been a while since i read a long book in just some days.

before leaving for the mountains, i did a recap of the books i was reading: Tania Hershman's The White Road - i received the book on July 14th, read a first story right away, and then read it in single stories, to make it last longer, and alternately read the story collection Common Boundary, which i finished by end of July. at that time, Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek arrived, and again, it's a book i want to last. plus, all 3 books are intense, dense reads, with multiple layers of thoughts and themes included, which adds to the time they take.

parallel to Annie Dillard, i also ordered "Shine" - an anthology of positive SF (just 2 stories read so far, so this will be one of the September reads to come), and "A Year of Fog" by Michelle Richmond. a holiday-read kind of book. it's been a while since the last of that kind.. Nick Hornby, that was, A Long Way Down - a book that i (ironically fitting) started to read on the flight back from Vienna.

for me, right now it's interesting to see that i am rather in a short story rhythm, and those longer novels feel rather ..long. and to fit the picture, the parts that really amazed me about The Year of Fog where the additional, added-in chapters that weren't direct parts of the narrative (which is about a child lost at a beach), but the parts that were like short stories, detours in photography, brain memory, and the past of the main character (who is a photographer) - chapters that start like this:

"Photography is all about light. The word photography come from the Greek word photos, meaning light, and graphein, meaning writing. Every time you take a picture, you are writing in light."

in some ways, the novel is science fiction of a different kind: a fictional family story, with science detours included. a format that connects to Tania Hershman's book The White Road: a collection of science-inspired short stories, many of them starting with a quote from the magazine New Scientist. now i just looked through them again - and indeed, one of them is about photography and memory: "I Am A Camera". here's a quote:

"She thought of herself as one of those old devices with a photographer hiding under a cloth, producing sepa-washed pictures. She clicked and whirred and stored images inside, cataloguing scenes from her memory. Faces and landscapes, each titled for easy access, later on."

here the links to the both book webpages: The White Road (story excerpt included), The Year of Fog.

and here's the link to my "bookshelf" posts: virtual book notes.

will be interesting to see how his reading pattern continues, if my focus remains on short stories for a while, or if autumn and winter bring a different pattern.