Run Towards the Danger, by Sarah Polley

I've always liked Sarah Polley in my mind, even though I've only seen a handful of her movies. I believe the first thing I saw her in was The Sweet Hereafter and then Go a couple years later. In 2013, I saw her autobiographical documentary Stories We Tell and I was so impressed by her, though now I don't remember a whole lot about it. My memory is of a mood and a look more than anything. Though I guess I also remember thinking she seemed very smart and thoughtful. In any case, I was placing an order with my neighborhood community goods recycler and they had a copy of her book so I bought it on a whim. I wasn't necessarily intending to start it right away, but it's a collection of essays and last Thursday I thought maybe I'd just read the first essay. It turned out to be a rather long one, about her playing Alice at the Stratford Festival and having scoliosis and developing stage fright and a whole lot of other things, but I guess I was hooked. I was leaving the following day for a work trip to Atlanta and I ended up finishing the book across my flights there and back. 

Run Towards the Danger tackles difficult – even terrifying – events from Polley's own life, from the aforementioned stage fright and scoliosis, to the harrowing experiences she had as a child actor working with Terry Gilliam, and her high risk first pregnancy, among others. While she tells these stories and processes the events on an individual level, she also always has a lens beyond herself to how these stories are part of a larger picture. You can see just how much she understands her own position of privilege, even in the context of some horrific events she herself has experienced. There is a lengthy end note about her decision to seek private medical care in the U.S. for concussion symptoms and the lengths she goes to defend Canadian healthcare and her support for free healthcare for all is almost comical, except that I believe she is in earnest and feeling conflicted about her decision. 

I was impressed by Sarah Polley after seeing Stories We Tell and this book has only deepened my respect for her.

James, by Percival Everett

I'm not sure why it took me so long to get to reading James. I got my copy in March of 2024 when Percival Everett did a reading and signing at P&T Knitwear in New York. It looks like I went out of town a few days later and when I came back, I read other things. Or I didn't read at all, for a while there. It's sat on my shelf ever since. The fact that it's a hardcover edition didn't help – I always prefer to read paperbacks. And I think part of my hesitation was the subject matter itself. I wasn't sure I wanted to retread Huck Finn, even if I did trust Everett to do it well. It's been a very long time since I read Huckleberry Finn – I'm not even sure I've read it in its entirety. But I'm familiar with it in the way anyone who grew up here (at least when I did) must probably be.

I'm also not sure what led me to pull it out to read just over a week ago. I was about to finish Dooneen and was scanning my shelves and I looked at James and wondered, why haven't I read it yet? So I laid it out and a couple days later, I started it. I read nearly 100 pages in that first sitting. 

One of the things I've always marveled at in Everett's books is the way he can meld comedy and tragedy, with a humor that is often ironic and biting, but James has less of that type of comedy than, for instance, The Trees or Erasure. It's a very tender book. I wrote very little about Telephone when I read it, but it's probably closer in mood to James than the other Everett books I've read.

Once I was into it, there were a few times when my anxiety about reading it did make me pause. The middle section in particular, when Jim and Huck were traveling and running into various risky situations was the most stressful. I found I could often read only one chapter at a time. Oddly, the situation gets arguably worse in the latter third of the book, but I didn't find that as hard going. At the conclusion I felt – and I think this is how one must feel – that Percival Everett made Huckleberry Finn make sense. 

Maigret at the Gai-Moulin, by Georges Simenon; Dooneen, by Keith Ridgway

A few weeks ago I was with my dad at a thrift store in Bay Ridge and I found a stack of Georges Simenon Maigret books. I'd never read any Simenon, but I had watched and enjoyed the recent Maigret adaptation, so I bought the lot – eight books in total. I knew there were a lot of Maigret books, but when I went to figure out the order mine belonged in, I was shocked to see just how many – and across what timespan: 75 novels, plus an additional 28 short stories, published over a period of more than 40 years! I started with Maigret at the Gai-Moulin because it was the earliest among the books I bought. Published in 1931, it's the tenth Maigret novel. 

I expected the book to be set in Paris, but in fact this one takes place in Belgium. Maigret almost seems a minor character in the book. He doesn't turn up until well along in the story, when he turns out to have been trailing the murder victim, a wealthy Greek man whose body is found in a basket at the zoo. Of course he interferes with the case, bests the local police, and solves the crime for them. The more central figure in the book is a young man who is suspected of the murder – a good kid who's gotten caught up with a bad crows. When Maigret clears him of the murder, he cleans up his ways and is sent off to do the king's work in the Belgian Congo, so surely everything will have worked out for him in the long run!

Last week, just as I was finishing the Maigret book, the latest installment from my New Directions subscription showed up: Dooneen, by Keith Ridgway and I decided to go right into it. I hadn't heard of the author and the book may not even be officially out yet in the U.S. if Amazon's publication date is to be trusted. I read just the beginning of the blurb on the back and thought it sounded like interesting speculative fiction, and I have to admit I was very drawn to the design of the edition. 

Some minor spoilers follow.