I’m reading “Spadework” by Timothy Findley. My first of his. At first it seemed a boring book, it’s in the prose of mundane American fiction. And then everything seemed too perfect: a woman and her family living and working in Stratford, Ontario, the man an actor, the woman an artist/ props maker. The child precotious. Being me, I just waited for something to break the normalness of it, like you do in a suspense film (which I don’t like, by the way). Slowly, the normal routine of the family is altered, elements sneaking in. Also, the perspectives of the periferal characters are sneaking in as well. The easy prose, the extra details that so far seem only to be filler where I would rather they contribute to something, as foreshadowing maybe, or is the subtext -all the details of the setting, for example- I hope they all add up to something in the end. I think it’s a sneaky book. I think the simpleness of the writing and the normalness of the family is a trick and both are going to fall away in the end into a clever resolution.

P.S. It’s a sunny Sunday afternoon and I was reading my book while lying in the sun coming through my window. I spent the day getting rid of stuff and organizing. I recycled a whole pile of junk paper that I was keeping for the purposes of crafts. But really it was mostly paper I’d obtained from recycle bins in the first place and since I hadn’t used it yet, back it went.

I cleared my bookshelf too. All my manga is going. I’m a grown up now (?). As well I’m getting rid of all my ancient philosophers. I’m a person of the contemporary age (?). Except for The Poetics because my copy is pretty. Also, do you know how many paper-dictionaries I have? Four. One is for cutting out of. One is my pocket Oxford. One was my dad’s and had a fetching red cloth cover. One is my concise Oxford with the thin paper. I like how the thin paper feels.