A couple weeks ago, I shared some recent short story reading, but right now I’m thinking about reading the final stories in Margaret Atwood’s Dancing Girls. And how I’ll soon read the next section from her newest collection Old Babes in the Wood.

But this year’s talk of MARM begins with a novel I reread for last year’s MARM, tho I didn’t write about it. The first half of my 2024 has been stuffed with goals I’d set for last year; it’s taken time for the past to connect with my present-day and to afford a space for futures planning. (I just realised today that I hadn’t, yet, added the links, that I included in last year’s round-up post, to the event’s main page.)

In the past, when I’ve reread and reconsidered The Edible Woman, this scene came to mind:

“Every time she walked into the supermarket and heard the lilting sounds coming from the concealed loudspeakers she remembered an article she had read about cows who gave more milk when sweet music was played to them. But just because she knew what they were up to didn’t mean she was immune. These days, if she wasn’t careful, she found herself pushing the cart like a somnambulist, eyes fixed, swaying slightly, her hands twitching with the impulse to reach out and grab anything with a bright label.”

When I reread TEW last year, however, this part—most of the parts about how we consume—did not stand out.

Overall, it felt as though I was reading more slowly too, with my attention snagging on previously unremarkable scenes. I had mostly forgotten the intimate relationships—as well as the moments of frustration—with Peter and Duncan, and the fractures in her relationships with women too.

I had always liked the parts about her workplace, because I felt as though I’ve been in that lunchroom for much of my working life, but this time when I was reading, her sense of being an outsider, unsure of the social rules to be followed with the other women, felt heightened, more strained.

The parts about consumerism that struck me were the parts about relationships—in this case about how we pretend there aren’t any, how we distance ourselves from the horrors connected to what we consume.

I thought about how we expect other people—people we dismiss, people we regard as less-than—to do that dirty work. About how we lie to ourselves about what it requires of them to punch a clock to do that work.

“What fiendishness went on in kitchens across the country, in the name of providing food! But the only alternative for that sort of thing, seemed to be the cellowrapped and plasticoated and cardboard-cartoned surrogates. Substitutes, or merely disguises? At any rate, whatever killing had gone on had been done efficiently, by somebody else, beforehand.”

And when it was all done, I wondered again about how it is that certain novels—certain writers of novels—are so refractive that, every time we return to them, there’s something new that’s more prominent, more astute, more provocative than it seemed to be on an earlier reading.

For this year, I’m torn as to whether to reread an earlier or later novel; I had thought I’d revisit Lady Oracle last year, but didn’t get to it after all. I’m thinking that I might like to reread the Maddaddam trilogy next year, as the mini-series should have developed further by then. (I’ve written about Year of the Flood and Maddaddam here, but nobody’s yet read them during MARM.) I’m also still intrigued by the possibility of rereading The Blind Assassin, a real favourite, but also a real commitment.

And, I suspect that, if any of you has specific ideas about what you might read for MARM, suddenly that idea, those ideas, will be immediately and thoroughly appealing to me too.

Over the course of six previous MARMs, nearly every novel has been covered-even the children’s stories, from the skinniest standalones to the doorstoppers; I can hardly wait to hear which books will land in readers’ stacks this year.

I know some of you have had titles in mind since last November, whether that’s because something in particular has been lodged unread on your shelves at home because you enjoy her work, or whether only one title is readily accessible because you don’t particularly enjoy her but that book’s within easy reach.

Are you looking ahead to November too? Or, have you already been reading something by Margaret Atwood this year?