What is Theressa Slind Reading?

Let’s start by giving thanks for Hilary Mantel. I’m half-way through the newest in her Thomas Cromwell trilogy, The Mirror & the Light, and, like Wolf Hall and Bring up the Bodies, it’s genius, the perfect book for now (or any time). The first paragraph contains this sentence: “The morning’s circumstances are new and there are no rules to guide us.” It felt right from the start. Maybe because the first book I read of Mantel’s was Beyond Black, a novel about a medium, I find her ability to inhabit characters spooky. Like she’s a medium through which Thomas Cromwell speaks. And this Cromwell is the best: tough, funny, loyal, ruthless, kind, vulnerable, haunted, fatherly, shrewd, surprised to learn he looks like a murderer. He’s the smartest guy in the room, but it can’t end well and I read on filled with dread. Bonus: The Mirror & the Light has taught me a new word to describe the former colour of my daughter’s bedroom and, coincidentally, my pandemic mood and style: subfusc.

On my walks—now we thank public libraries and the outdoors—I’m listening to the audiobook, Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker. I like that subtitle with its singular mind, as if this family with its twelve (!!) children, six (!!!) of whom were diagnosed with schizophrenia, became trapped inside one unwell mind. Kolker has an elegant writing style and the story he’s telling is fascinating and tragic. I still can’t get over the fact that the first ten of Mimi Galvin’s twelve children were—with apologies to boys—boys! Ten! Okay, enough exclamation points. Just read it (or find an audio version; I could listen to the narrator, Sean Pratt, all day).