As you may know, and as I may have mentioned at least once, I have recently been obsessed by Louise Penny’s Armand Gamache book series. This could be a good as well as a bad thing. I’ve read the series twice now and have taken a few forays into the depths of some plot points. I am immersed. One of the negative things I find in binge reading and re-reading so closely together is noticing things like continuity errors that pop up on occasion, things that would typically slip by the reader if the books were read as they were released rather than all at once, the change of a pet’s name or a grandchild’s nickname; the age of someone when their parents died. There is also the redundancy that follows a book series in order to catch-up new readers with things that series regulars know, like the physical characteristics of the characters (I’ve had some issues with a couple of the women characters’ descriptions), their phobias (heights & closed spaces) and their foibles, their likes and dislikes (like Beauvoir’s love of steak frites – why mayonnaise with fries, someone please, please explain this to me, and his dislike of Anglos), their idiosyncrasies (the poetry), their hidden agendas and pasts that play into how they act and react to others and to situations. One of the things I do love about binge reading and re-reading is discovering the Easter eggs hidden and the foreshadowing that are only visible in hindsight.

The amount of times Penny uses the phrase, All will be well, or it will be alright long before it becomes an important theme of one of the books surprised me when I noticed it in earlier books. It is one of my favorite sayings, attributed to St. Julian of Norwich and so it stands out to me whenever it’s mentioned in any form. The camaraderie and the back and forth that certain characters have; the senses of humor and the differences how one acts with others; the character growth; the emotion that I feel in my depths. I found myself weeping in parts and that is rare for me in reading a book. The title of this is one of the phrases that made me laugh out loud. I found the dialogue fun and realistic.

One of my favorite things in books about real places is recognizing those places, in this case places I’ve been to in Québec. There aren’t that many, but when Penny mentions meeting the Brunels at the Dix-Trente in Brossard, I paused to smile – that is right where we stayed in Québec for our visit during the eclipse. When she talks about how the Catholic Church came into and then out of favor with the Quebecois, I wanted, no, needed to know more about how church words became swear words in Québec. About halfway through the series I noticed that I stopped google translating every French phrase used by Penny because I had begun to understand them in the prose. It brought me deeper into the story. After decades of being a hockey fan (Let’s go, NY Rangers!), I was excited to discover why the Montréal Canadiens are called the Habs; so many years of ignorance and no google when I was a child visiting the Hockey Hall of Fame with my parents.

I enjoy reading about real life happenings and people and enjoy looking them up and learning more about them (one of the favorite things about reading on my Kindle). The series isn’t historical fiction, but there is modern history involved just as our lives are entwined with the histories of our own areas. When Gamache went to British Columbia and described the Haida people and their crest poles, I remembered seeing them on our visit to the Royal Ontario Museum. I went back to read up on them and found that the museum was built around them so that they’d fit. While at the ROM, I thought they were replicas and was enthralled by them. In learning that they are original, my feelings are mixed: I’m glad to have seen them, but sad that they were removed from their native habitat and First Nations people and land. I was familiar with the Quebec Bridge Disaster from my visits to Kahnawake.

I intend to share some of those real people and places I discovered in Penny’s series with you in subsequent posts.

I have about eight weeks of writing or art prompts to also share with you from the books. My intention is to publish a prompt once a week through September 18 depending on how many more appear to me. As part of my own summer intentions (coming tomorrow), I am going to try to use the prompts myself as part of my own writing exercises. We all need something to give us a break or to jump start our creativity. For me that means to just keep writing.

For anyone interested in reading Louise Penny’s Armand Gamache series, the first book is Still Life, and is found in bookstores and libraries as well as on the Libby app for those of us who enjoy reading e-books.

Ça va bien aller.