What’s Stephen J. Price Reading?
My 2025 goal is to read books I should have read by now. The first three installments are 100 Years of Solitude, The Woman in White and The Fifth Season (this one ended up on the list because I found it at a thrift store for $3.00 and I’ve always wanted to read it.) But before getting started, I chose to begin the year by rereading The Great Gatsby which I have read many times. A story about the rich behaving badly is as appropriate now as it was a hundred years ago: “they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” Once I put away Fitzgerald’s masterpiece, I tucked into 100 Years and cannot explain why I have waited so long. Anyone who is interested in nonlinear storytelling told with nuance, humour and tragedy with some magic realism thrown in will not be disappointed in this book. It is unrelenting in its exploration of time, memory, and our capacity to ignore the lessons of history. It, too, is relevant to our current state of affairs. As soon as I finished, I started it again. The only other book I did that with was Lord of the Flies and that was a long time ago. I worry that The Woman in White will not live up to the standard set by 100 Years of Solitude.
Stephen J. Price writes and teaches writing in Treaty 7 territory that he grew up calling Calgary. He is particularly interested in helping late bloomers, those who have taken up writing late in life.