I enjoy reading and while I’m not as voracious a reader as some people I know, most years I read several novels  sprinkled with a healthy dose of non-fiction. Still there are a lot of great books out there I’ve meant to read along the way, but just haven’t got around to. Then of course new books come along to catch my interest.

Sometimes I read slowly, especially if it is a long and complex novel. I like to savour the tone, hear the cadence, relish every second of my experience in that world. And yet there are times I’ll gallop through books, hardly putting them down until I reach the final page.

Sometimes it seems there is a “right time” for me to read certain books. I can think of a number of novels I’ve had in front of me that I couldn’t settle into, only to gobble them down a few years later.  My reading choices are eclectic and I bounce in all directions from book to book. .

Until a year or two ago, I had never read anything by Mordecai Richler. How could that be? I rectified that by digging into the fantastic Solomon Gursky was Here. What a great book that was! And now I just read The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. Oh that Duddy – I admired his drive and his ingenuity but he was so caught up in his quest for land it blinded him, rendering him incapable of caring for the important people in his life.  What a setting too, Montreal in the 40s, a city divided along wealth and ethnic lines, and Sainte-Agathe where young Duddy the waiter dreams of being a landowner, remembering the words of his grandfather – a man without land is nobody.

Now I’ll go back to my list of books I plan to read, and books others have suggested I read and maybe I’ll tackle one of those next, or perhaps I’ll stumble into the work of an author I’ve never even heard of before.