Bookcases do not only hold the volumes one has read. They also house those awaiting attention. The mere possession of a book is the earnest of its future companionship. Nor should the urge to purchase one be dismissed as impulse buying, to be resisted because there may not soon be time to read it. It will wait.

Books, like Brideshead, are meant to be revisited. Clifton Fadiman said that to reread a classic is not to see more in it than was seen before but to see more in oneself than was evident previously. To alter the dictum of Tennyson’s Ulysses, one is part of all that one has read. Each of us is still in process of formation because there are so many unread volumes that call out, ‘Read me!’.

In my case, one of them is Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The title is as familiar as is A Tale of Two Cities but its story line is still inconnu. The ‘intro’ to my edition promises that if the reader will bear with certain absurdities he will learn some things greatly to his advantage. Intriguing? Bien sûr, as the author might say. Verne was the father of ‘sci-fi’. Shall I find his science to be, like the Creemore brewery, a hundred years (140 actually) behind the times? This summer I shall know.

Another gap that should have been closed long ago is Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped. Other aspects of a Scottish Canadian heritage, including the Shorter Catechism and, on the refrigerator door, that blue and white St Andrew’s saltire magnet, were attended to long ago but the adventures of David Balfour on land and at sea have escaped my attention. The book should have been an early Christmas gift. Instead I was given The Yellow Briar, undoubtedly part of my predestination to live for so many years in Mono Township. I am told that in this Stevenson ‘boys’ book’ pathos and many a whiff of wind-blown heather await an adult reader.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment begins, “On an exceptionally hot evening in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged [in St Petersburg] “. He was hopelessly in debt”. I have long known that he committed a murder - two in fact - as a way of solving his problem. The terrible, the pitiful, the sublimely human are gathered, I am promised, in the 500 page compendium by the Russian author whose scheduled execution at age 28 had been commuted at the last minute and who then spent four years in a Siberian prison. The name of the impecunious man in the novel was Raskolnikov. Sound familiar? His case is upcoming on my summer dossier.

Plans are likely already underway for marking the 400th anniversary of the 1615 discovery by ‘white men’ of the Humber River and a new approach to Lake Ontario and Niagara. The previous route had been from Lachine and Fort Frontenac (Kingston).

That suggests some reading of the history of New France. Ontarians forget that that valiant but ill-fated colony included the Toronto to Windsor ‘corridor’ as well as the one from Huronia to Sault Ste. Marie.

I have been enjoying this month the classic novel The Golden Dog, a tale of the ancien régime. Of almost Tolstoyan length, the original version ran to 678 pages. An abridgement reduces that by half. Two weeks after Victoria Day, it may be worth noting that Queen Victoria said she greatly enjoyed the book.

The author, William Kirby (1817-1906), was a newspaper editor and customs collector at Niagara on-the-Lake. The story is both a Gothic style romance and a chronicle of the intrigue and corruption that lead to the downfall of New France. The fictional Angélique des Meloises is a beautiful, rich and ambitious femme fatale who would deceive or poison anyone in order to get to France and succeed La Pompadour at Versailles.

The real life ‘Intendant’, François Bigot, and his partner Joseph Cadet stole, doubledipped and drained the colonial treasury – “clip, cut and rob the king”. Under the dual authority in Canada at the time, the Governor commanded the military and administered justice but the Intendant supervised trade and finance. It was Wall Street previewed. The net profit to what the habitants called La Friponne (‘The Cheaters’) was about half the annual budget. It is no wonder the colony failed.

The golden dog of the book’s title was a gilded bas relief depicting a hound gnawing a bone. It adorned the Québec warehouse of one of the ‘good guys’ in the story. An enigmatic verse said, in translation: “I am a dog that gnaws a bone. / I lie and gnaw it all alone. / A time will come, which is not yet / When I’ll bite him by whom I’m bit”. It portended the comeuppance of the members of La Friponne and, perhaps equally, of the New Englanders who threatened le Canada.

Not to let history and romance dominate my literary agenda, I plan (D.V.) before the end of 2010 to re-read William Law’s A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. He was a master of ‘practical spirituality’, acknowledged as such by both John Wesley and Cardinal John Henry Newman who although he initially questioned the 1870 definition of papal infallibility, is on the eve of canonisation by the Pope. My copy of Law’s best-known work was published by the Paulist Press. He lived in the 18th Century but his insights and challenge continue to be timely,

The other re-read will be Deidre Bair’s 2003 biography, Jung. Second only to Sigmund Freud with whom he had serious disagreement, Carl Jung, like each of us, had his faults

but he helped us to see that psychology and religion can have a healthy symbiosis and that postmodern people can rediscover their souls.

The book Ecclesiastes in which, wrote one critic, there are depths but no heights says (12:12) “Of making (publishing?) many books there is no end and much study (reading?) is a weariness of the flesh”. No way.