Summer is coming to an end. The days are still warm, but the kids are getting ready to return to school. The mornings are suddenly cooler, the colors are changing, and so as the season moves towards fall and then winter, I shift my reading focus.
I split reading into three. The first world is the recounting of the real world. So, I read the Globe and Mail and skim stories and columns in the National Post. Organized crime and international rogue agents are all becoming part of the everyday world.
At lunch, I will often read a more serious book. In the past I have read Shakespeare’s plays, Proust’s Remembrance of Times Past, Joyce’s Ulysses, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Homer, and many others.
In the evening, I will pick up a crime novel, but with the swing into September, I begin reading spy novels specifically. Why? The winds have become cold, rain becomes the pattern, and the nights come earlier. It matches the gloomy world of the spy: secrets, betrayal, violence, multiple narratives, and an unsettled world at the end of the narrative.
And so, I started with, who else but John le Carré. I am reading his Agent Running in the Field. It is his last novel. It is different, detailing family life, personal relationships, and yet it is only a matter of time before the reader becomes immersed in a different world. I am only sixty pages in, but I already feel the chill of what is to come.
Next will be Beirut Station by Paul Vidich. He is a former American intelligence agent who has written excellent spy novels. And finally, I will be reading Tehran at Twilight by Salar Abdoh, a novel set in Iran. I’m certain the end will not be happy.
The purpose is to change things up. But more importantly, it is so I can get a feel for the twilight world where my novels take place. Not specifically a spy world, but a world where everyday people rub shoulders with spies. Both worlds will experience betrayal from fringe characters, violence by rogue actors, and danger for any protagonist.
In my mind, this narrative fits the world we live in.
