July 9, 2025: here’s what I’m reading

I finished Matthew Quick’s We Are The Light last night. The book is an epistolary (I love epistolaries), composed of letters from Lucas Goodgame, a former school counsellor and teacher who is present for a mass shooting at his hometown’s movie theatre. I had no idea of the subject matter before I started reading it; I picked the book out from our community book share shelf, located in a shelter near the ferry dock. Lucas is writing to his Jungian therapist about his post-event trauma, and as the story progresses, reality seems to shift ever so subtly like watching the world through a window that increasingly warps. It’s quite a book, and has a significant twist in the tail too so worth following the story through the slow and bewildering turns it takes. I appreciate a story written from inside a PTSD mind, a character who is reaching out to find purpose and life again, experiencing moments of love and joy and absurdity while missing the chances he has to turn.

I was struck by the fact that the characters in the book have names that evoke characters from the Hebrew Scriptures. Eli, Isaiah, Jacob, and Lucas himself who immediately evoked for me the story of Lucifer, the fallen angel. This is almost certainly deliberate (the book explores Jungian archetypes) and reading these characters as having dual functions in the narrative really deepened the work for me. That Lucs/Lucifer has a central role in a book called “We Are The Light” is no surprise, but if you read it, do familiarize yourself with these Biblical characters first, and especially with Lucifer, who is not probably who you think he is.

It’s the time of year for short stories now and I’ll be diving into a collection I also found in our community free book shelf, Cork Stories. These are all stories by different authors set in the county and the city of Cork, Ireland. In the introduction to the collection the editors quote one of the greatest Canadian short story writers, Alistair MacLeod: “The best fiction is specific in its setting but universal in its theme.” Macleod’s own seminal collection of stories called Island is one of the best books I have ever read, a collection of 16 stories mostly set on Cape Breton Island in the 1970s and they are dark and moody and beautifully crafted. Short stories of the very best kind live in the world between a novel, poetry and a good joke. They establish a setting and characters quickly, use concentrated language and crafted cadence to move the story along and usually end with a twist, or a sting or a punch line that is unexpected, or perhaps inevitably foreshadowed. I plan on reading these Cork stories and then diving back into the Journey Prize collections for the summer to find more great gems of Canadian story writing, a form that, thanks to people like Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro and Alistair MacLeod, became associated with Canadian writing in the 1970s and 1980s when I was first discovering literary fiction.\

What’s on your bedside table this summer?