Memorable/Influential Books 2022-23

Well, I had hoped my reading would have improved in volume by now, but I’m still crawling out of a hole in my ability to concentrate. Last year (2022) I did just barely manage to make 52 books, but this past year (2023) I didn’t – I could have if I had spent all my time reading in the last week of the year, which I did for a couple days, but alas, I just had other things I also needed to get done in my limited free time.

Last year I didn’t even make a post about my reading! I kept meaning to, but by the time it got to June I figured there was no point. So my “memorable books” post this year draws from two years of reading – 2022 and 2023 – which amounts to how much I was able to read in a single year pre-COVID.

So, here are my entirely subjective Karen’s most memorable (and/or influential) books of 2022-23, in no particular order. (Books I read in the last 2 years – they didn’t necessarily just come out then.)  

Nonfiction

Rooms: Women, Writing, Woolf by Sina Queyras

• I read this right after I read the Emma Healey memoir that came out the same year, and I was really struck by the contrast in terms of class, privilege, generation, and how a person becomes a writer.

Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping by Matthew Salesses

• I don’t teach fiction workshops exactly, but the book was still thought-provoking for any writing teacher–and with actionable recommendations. I wish for more such resources that refer to other genres.

Childhood, Youth, Dependency: The Copenhagen Trilogy by Tove Ditlevsen

• So raw and honest – about poverty, addiction, abortion, and so much more.

How We Read Now: Strategic Choices for Print, Screen, and Audio by Naomi S. Baron

• Baron is a linguist who has been studying this stuff for decades. The book helped me ground my intuition about why the internet has made it so much harder for me to read. Also read her more recent book about AI and writing.

Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe

• Everything you ever wanted to know about the I.R.A. but were afraid to ask. Holy crap.

Fiction

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa

• A world where people, things, and concepts are mysteriously disappeared out of existence — and out of ever having had existed.

The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22^nd Century by Olga Ravn

• An artificial life novel. In space.

Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

• No, I hadn’t read it before now. Loved the unhinged narrator. Disappointed by the ending, thought it would be weirder.

Poetry

The Absence of Zero by R. Kolewe.

• For sure the most memorable book I read in the past two years. I keep coming back to it. Exactly my kind of poetry. The kind of book you can dip into at random any time, and I do.

Xanax Cowboy by Hannah Green

• Loved this as soon as I read it, and so glad it was recognized with the GG. Really appreciated, among other things, the implicit critique of an entire generation (or more) of Canadian poets’ erstwhile obsession with The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (myself included).

Books I Read in 2021, Part 3

Just Kids and M Train by Patti Smith

After having it on my list for years, I finally got to Patti Smith’s memoir about her long friendship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe. One of the most striking things about the story is the confluence: both Smith and Mapplethorpe became iconic cultural figures of their generation, but just happened to meet well before they were famous when he was buying something at the bookstore where she worked. They eventually make the desperate decision to “apply” to become residents at the Chelsea Hotel, and, having succeeded, end up at a cultural crossroads, a time and place where famous figures fly through the story and cross paths with Smith’s and Mapplethorpe’s respective developing talents.

Patti Smith on The Tonight Show

I enjoyed this book so much I moved on to Smith’s later memoir M Train, a much less straightforward, more meditative and wandering book that’s an oblique, belated response to the death of her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith. M Train is much harder to describe—but I think I liked it even better, because that’s the kind of reader I am.

This gif is only tangentially related to the book below, but I am standing by it.

A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis

I finally got to this little book, and it lives up to its reputation. Lewis struggles with his faith while grappling with the loss of his wife to cancer. They didn’t have long together, and the intensity of his questioning and his suffering make it seems like the brevity of the relationship focused his emotions, then put them through the wringer of a Christian scholar’s brain.  

Voices from Chernobyl: An Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich

This book! I’ve been recommending it to everyone, and it was for sure the highlight of my reading year. Alexievich is a well-known, Nobel-winning Belarusian journalist; this is probably her best-known book. I hadn’t read any of her work but had filed away my desire to do so back when she took the Nobel. The book is almost 100% pure interview transcript. Working about a decade after Chernobyl, Alexievich interviewed those who refused to leave, those who were sent to clean up, and those who returned; activists, teachers, scientists, engineers, army conscripts, bureaucrats, exiles, and the families of the dead. Among the pure grief—and there is a lot of that—sit anger, frustration, resignation, denial, desperation, accusation, and truly impressive amounts of vodka—universal cure and universal currency.

On to 2022’s books! I’m already, way, way behind. I made the mistake of buying some temporary streaming subscriptions for a Christmas treat, so I’ve been watching too much TV. They just ran out, though, so I can get back to reading now–assuming I can keep off the doomscrolling.

Books I Read in 2021, Part 2

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Okay, yes, I have read this book umpteen times, starting when I was about 13 or 14, I think, when I stayed up all night to finish it. I even wrote a substantial poem about it in my second book, where I imagined Jane in conversation with Anne of Green Gables (a book I’ve read even more than umpteen times), so suffice it to say I’ve thought about Jane Eyre a lot.

This time I read it aloud to my daughter, and so many new things struck me, things that I’m certainly not the first person to notice, but just came into relief for me this time around. How much of a romance novel it is, first of all. How FUCKING MUCH Rochester talks. My daughter kept commenting on this. Like, shut up already, dude. We kind of really wanted Helen Burns to shut up, too. And then she dies, so. How complex some of these characters are: Jane, of course, but also St. John Rivers, a terrible but fascinating person.

Stop talking, Edward! (Timothy Dalton was an ’80s Rochester, the first one I remember seeing on TV.)

We mainly thought Jane really needed to get out more and meet more men before she makes rash decisions. And how a lot of problems would have been solved by modern divorce laws.

Reading any such classic book to children also necessitates glossing the rampant colonialism, and the religiosity, too (something we also had to talk about in Dracula).

For some reason, these are the first three results when I search for “Women Talking” on Amazon.ca. Hint: I was looking for the first one. Someone figured out how to keyword their free erotic novels on Kindle. Wait… what is “erotcia”?

Women Talking by Miriam Toews

Another party I’m late too, but I wanted to make sure I’d read it since there is a film in the works I’ll no doubt want to see. My favourite thing about this book was the narrator and the perspective he brings to the events of the story. So little “happens” in the book (as you might guess from the title), and yet by the end, it’s like the world has changed-without-changing — not even so much for the women (though it has for them, too), but for the narrator. I’m so interested in how this profound transformation will get translated in the film.

I Got the Dog: A Memoir of Rising by Amanda Boyden

This is on here not so much for the story of Boyden’s life, but for the oblique little window into the lives of literary celebrities. Yes, the book had many fine qualities and Boyden’s work stands on its own blah blah blah. But this list is for personal memorability, and those who know me know I have things to say about Joseph Boyden, which I will not say here, and this is Amanda Boyden’s post-relationship memoir.

There’s not much gossip in it, really, but the little throwaways keep you asking questions. Wait, does the literary in-crowd in Canada really go on vacation trips with leading literary journalists? Wait, that’s Gord Downie she is talking about like she was in love with him? It took me a minute to realize who she meant.

This book doesn’t exist (apparently).

These Canadian celebrity moments pass with so little comment I’m torn between whether it’s done to seem nonchalant or done because a U.S. audience wouldn’t see them as important. And this was not published in Canada; in fact, you can’t even find it in the Chindigo database—it’s like the book doesn’t exist. (I did not detect any references to Indigo executives in the memoir.) This nonexistence was exactly how I came to read the book–as soon as I heard among writers that you couldn’t get it at Chindigo, I immediately ordered it at an independent.

NISHGA by Jordan Abel

Of the many poetry books I read this year, NISHGA was my most memorable. A deeply personal conceptual work about intergenerational trauma, and centring the Indigenous reader, NISHGA uses, among other things, essay-like transcripts, visual poetry, and original documents to create a work of gripping emotional intensity, outstanding intellectual rigour, and hard-won truth. Even though (admission) I find some conceptual poetry a bit of a slog, NISHGA was unputdownable for me.

One more post to come that will include my MOST memorable book of the year!

Books I Read in 2021, Part 1

Jeesh, January will be over soon, so I better get on my annual blog post!

After a miserably light reading year in 2020, I was determined to make 95 books in 2021, but I could see right away that it would be an issue given how exhausted I was between pandemic-work, pandemic-family, and pandemic-buying-and-selling-houses-and-moving. So I decided early on that I’d also read, and count, chapbooks in my total. So, I only sort of read 95 books—and I barely made it even so.

I also set a “page goal” in the app I’m using – The StoryGraph – just so I could see how close I was to reading an “average” 200-page book. I didn’t quite make the page count, but it was close. On average, a “book” for me was just under 200 pages. Not bad considering all the chapbooks of less than 20 pages I read! There were a few doozies in there that balanced it out.

Check out this neat graph you can get on The StoryGraph:

It’s my reading pattern for the year! You’ll note the same general pattern in 2020, although with thousands fewer pages:

What are those dips and rises? The dips are the school term. The rises are summer and Christmas breaks.

Without further ado (have I written this like a recipe blogger?), here are my most memorable books of 2021! It was hard to choose this year, so I went long with a list of 10 – well, 11, because I couldn’t decide between the Patti Smith books. Remember that my list is whimsical and reflects how the mood strikes me as I write this. It’s not a best-of!  

Some close runners-up that I won’t talk about: The Baudelaire Fractal by Lisa Robertson; Disorientation: Being Black in the World by Ian Williams; The Lightning of Possible Storms by Jonathan Ball; Here the Dark by David Bergen; Heteroskeptical by Marcus McCann; The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith; The City We Became by N.K. Jemisin; St. Mary at Main by Patrick Friesen; The Perfect Nanny by Leila Slimani.

Dracula by Bram Stoker

I had never read this before, and I read it aloud to my daughter over a period of months. We laughed a lot at how obtuse the characters are, how they really needed to treat Mina with more respect, and, especially, at how much Van Helsing talks in his semi-comprehensible babble. All and all well worth reading to see what all the fuss is about. We especially appreciated all the Transylvanian landscape and people, having been there a few years ago and visited one of the castles purported to be related to the Dracula legend (my vacation photo below).

Bran Castle

The Centaur’s Wife by Amanda Leduc

A good companion piece to her also excellent nonfiction book Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space (which I also read this year), Leduc has written a fairy-tale-esque novel centring on human characters with disabilities and fantastic characters with nonhuman qualities, all set in a world where the earth itself is consciously taking revenge on humanity. What sticks in my mind most is the harrowing mid-point climax (which I won’t give away…).

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

You know I’ve been teaching basic story structure too long when I keep getting excited about mid-point climaxes. Klara and the Sun is a quiet book with a strangely meditative quality stemming from the voice of its narrator, Klara, an android programmed to be devoted to a lonely human teenager. I was hit hard by the quiet but central reveal about her host family’s motivations. I didn’t like this book as much as my favourite Ishiguro (Never Let me Go, which I’m guessing is a lot of peoples’ favourite), but this was a satisfyingly Ish-y experience.

More memorable books in another post soon!

My Memorable 2020 Reading

At the top of my notes for this, my annual blog post, I wrote “memorable 2019 reading,” which is maybe just your average new year’s date error, but sure feels like an attempt to block something out.

It was a year when, buoyed by my success in meeting the 95-books goal in 2019, I set that as my goal again, only to be struck, like everyone else, with an imposed fit of unproductivity and doom-scrolling which also pretty much doomed my reading goal by the coming of the spring equinox. So I downgraded to a 52-books challenge like the one I first did in 2018. And I barely made it.

Unsurprisingly, 2020 has been my worst reading year since I started, but I’ve taken to reminding myself why I started tracking my reading in the first place: because the internet had been making me stupid, and I had not been reading nearly so much as I had in my youth. I have no idea how many books I was reading each year before 2018, but I’m certain it was far less than 52.

I also stopped using Goodreads to track books this year, because it’s owned by Amazon, and Amazon is particularly evil if you care about books. But (because U.S. politics) I do still subscribe to The Washington Post, also owned by Bezos, and thus my righteousness is diminished.

Here are my most memorable (for me) books of 2020:

Most memorable fiction was definitely Valeria Luiselli’s Lost Children Archive. I read this early in the year because Luiselli was scheduled to keynote at a conference I was going to, and I wanted to be up to speed. Well, she cancelled, but wow wow wow this book bowled me over. It’s a hard-to-describe novel that I am drawn to for the form and the language more than the story, but I could say it’s about audio recording, research, family, and, centrally, unaccompanied migrant children. Luiselli had previously written about her experiences volunteering as an interpreter for asylum seekers in New York, experiences which seem to have informed this novel. It’s also a book full of bibliographies, so it’s given me a big list of more things to want to read.

I read a lot of nonfiction this year for a project I was researching, and the most memorable one for me was Martin Hägglund’s This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom. Arriving via Hägglund’s appearance on my favourite CBC show, Tapestry, I came for the existentialism, and I stayed for the unexpected economics. Some things annoyed me about the writing style, and there were precious few women quoted in the book (like maybe 2 or 3 in a book chock-full of references and on a topic–the value of time, see below–that is has huge feminist implications). But in the end it did bolster me with what I took to be its main insight: the only thing with inherent value is one’s own time. Treat it thusly.

But I’m a fiction reader at heart, and the rest of my memorable books of the year are all made-up stories.

Or at least mostly made-up. I read both Bring up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel, the sequels to Wolf Hall (which I read in 2019). These are very long books—the last one was somewhere close to 900 pages—but oh so worth it. You have to get used to the style, at first—a style which begins to change in the last book as the narrator, occasionally, accidentally on purposely, uses the first person. That protagonist is Henry VIII’s chief advisor, Thomas Cromwell, and his rise and fall over the course of the three books are so subtle and yet so gargantuan and unmistakable, they are rivalled only by the arc of the series’ other chief character—the antagonist, I suppose–Henry VIII himself.

When I finished Wolf Hall, I missed Henry; he was so jovial and lively and seductive. But by the end of The Mirror and the Light, he is clearly a dangerous tyrant, and that change was slow and painful and inevitable and made so much sense.

Reading these reminded me a bit of when I read, ages ago, Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, which took me months to read in its intricate faux-18th century prose but which was so good, once I was fully immersed, that when I finished I was tempted just to start back at the beginning again so I wouldn’t have to leave. (But, as it was also a zillion pages long, I didn’t.)

Oh–and there are no real spoilers here because Mantel’s books are historical for crying out loud–call me when to get to the mob from York, stirred up by unfounded rumours, conspiracy theories, and politicians counting on plausible deniability, who descend on London looking for an unlikely regime change. I don’t think politics had descended so far when Mantel first started, but the nasty politics of Tudor England started to look more contemporary as the series went on.

In the blast from the past category, I read Bridget Jones’s Diary. Oh yes, I did. And I thought it was delightful. I now understand what all the fuss was about more than 20 years ago when this book launched what would be called “chick lit” (still a terrible name). I was fresh out of grad school in English, and I’m sure I thought it was beneath me. And sure, some things in here don’t date well. All the smoking and the dieting. And ho boy, casual workplace sexual harassment that the characters joke about. But hear me out: this is a fantastic exercise in voice. It’s super-duper first-person, and she owns her obsessions, whether it’s weight loss or her jerky boss.  Also books like this make me want to go to London again so bad.

On a completely different note, I finally finished Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, which I’d repeatedly started and stopped. (I sometimes read like that: I can be “reading” a book for years, without really abandoning it.) If you know anything about this book, you should understand why: people have called it “pain porn” and objected to—in addition to issues such as the depiction of disability–the over-the-top horror of the protagonist’s life.

Seriously, whenever you think, oh, finally, that’s the worst that can happen to him, no, really, she has thought of something even worse, and [SPOILERS] yet, given SO MUCH TRAUMA—I can’t emphasize enough how much trauma is going in here, folks, this book takes the “what’s the worst that can happen” to an extreme—he becomes a successful, filthy rich corporate lawyer who marries a movie star. But even though I have mixed feelings about this book for so many reasons, it is, if nothing else, very memorable. There’s a lot to like about the care with which Yanagihara has built the cast of characters and their intricate, fully developed relationships.

The last book I read in 2020 was the salve I needed to end the year on: Carmen Maria Machado’s short story collection Her Body and Other Parties. It’s got everything: plagues and apocalypses, new takes on urban legends, a cast of kooky artists at an isolated residency, lots of women, lots of queer women, and, best of all in my opinion, a story made up entirely of Law and Order: SVU episode descriptions. This book was just up what I call my weirdness alley.

I am, hopefully and perhaps foolishly, starting with 95 as a goal again in 2021. Wish me luck.

2019 Year in Books

It’s time for my annual blog post about what I read in the past year!

Buoyed up by having read 67 books in 2018—more, in fact, because I realized later there were a few that I had forgotten to count–in 2019, I joined the #95books challenge. I was way ahead for the first part of the year, but I got behind in the fall when teaching started up again, and just barely made it over the break to 95 books on Dec. 31. According to Goodreads, I read about 22,000 pages, or about 230 pages per book on average.

My original plan to concentrate on translated books in 2019 totally went out the window. Only about a quarter of the books I read were for what I’d deem “pleasure,” as in, I chose them kind of on a whim. The rest I read for work, for a specific research purpose, or for my daughter, or because I was reviewing the book.

As others have observed, doing big book challenges makes one less apt to abandon books, and I found this hard. I read more books that I didn’t like or find useful than I would have liked this year, especially towards the end when I was racing to meet my goal. I had to decide really fast, like in the first 50 pages, if the book was worth using more precious reading time on. I think the solution is to let myself “count” a book toward my goal so long as I’ve read past those 50 pages.

Here are the books I found the most memorable this year. It just so happens I picked one fiction, one non-fiction, one poetry, and one drama, but I didn’t plan it that way:

Sally Rooney, Conversations with Friends. Though I was impressed with Normal People, I’m wondering now how much I was influenced by all the hype around that book, because months later, I think find myself thinking much more about her earlier book, Conversations with Friends, which I also read this year.

Miranda July, It Chooses You. This is a delightfully odd non-fiction book by the incomparable July, in which she interviews random people in LA chosen through their classified ads selling used goods. I most remember the boy who created frog habitats in his back yard, and the man who wrote dirty birthday cards for his wife. It’s about people and what you can learn if you just talk to them.

Karen Solie, The Caiplie Caves. Probably my favourite of the books I read this year. I reviewed this book in the The Globe and Mail, and I could have gone on and on about it. It’s a sideways take about what poets are to do during this time of existential crisis—only set in a medieval hermit’s cave. Solie’s work is a poetry benchmark. Unsurprisingly, the book has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

Cliff Cardinal, Huff & Stitch, which were published together, but it’s Huff that had the big effect on me. Regret not seeing this play when it was produced here. Huff is an in-your-face whirlwind of tragedy, about intergenerational trauma and the relentless loss faced by Indigenous communities and, in particular, Indigenous youth.

In 2020, I expect to keep reading for research, work, reviewing, and my child, but my project for those “extra” books I get to choose for whatever reason? I’m going to read books I already own and are sitting on my shelves taking up space. Then I’m going to give them away unless I can justify keeping them under one of the following categories:

• favourite books I am likely to read again
• books useful for reference
• books by people I know
• small press books (overlaps greatly with the previous on)
• books I’m attached to for strong sentimental reasons (note to self: high bar required)

I just don’t have that much space, and the library exists, right? I use the library all the time. I’m not too optimistic about the number of books I’ll actually be able to give away using this method, but time will tell. See you this time next year.

2018 Reading Challenge: Part 3

For my “favourite” books of 2018, I can’t just pick one thing from each genre – that seems a bit too artificial for how haphazard my reading was last year. Instead, I’ve just highlighted the books that I’m still thinking about the most, even months after reading them. Call them my most memorable books of 2018 (most of which didn’t come out in 2018).

I can’t not mention the third installment of N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, The Stone Sky. While I was the most blown away by the first installment, the rest of the trilogy didn’t fail to deliver. It’s tremendously inventive and intricately drawn far-future science fiction by a Black woman. She has won umpteen major awards for this trilogy, and she doesn’t really need a recommendation from me. But here it is anyway.

I’m still thinking about Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki’s YA graphic novel This One Summer. It’s a haunting coming-of-age tale that takes place at the lake, “this one summer.” Girls and women of different ages each change in different ways, and the pubescent protagonist learns—with resistance, even dread—what she’s up against becoming a woman. Definitely YA, not kids’.

I read a few Hope Nicholson/Bedside Press comics anthologies this year, and the one that stood out for me was Gothic Tales of Haunted Love, which is just what it sounds like – spooky, gory, supernatural doomed romances, by a variety of artists and authors in a variety of styles. The stories featured many LGBTT* and BIPOC characters, breathing life into a genre that could otherwise come across as old-fashioned and stale. My daughter was so taken by the presence of this book in my house that I had to write a guide for her telling her which stories she could read and which were not age appropriate. (My daughter is obsessed with comics and I have to watch every one that I bring home.)

In cross-genre poetry/memoir/essay, I finally got around to reading Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. I recognized it as poetry, myself, and only realized that some people categorize it as essays upon reading some reviews. I’ve never believed in genre myself, so its cross-genre quality just makes me love it more. A book about a colour is a beautiful idea, and blue is the best colour, right? (Weirdly, I also read Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red this year, which isn’t about a colour, only it sort of is….)

One of the literary classics I picked up this year was Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea. I have to say that what stays with me is more an impression than a specific element of craft or thematic takeaway, though I know it has many; for me, this book was an immersive experience that I can still kind of sink into in my mind.

The most important book I read this year was Gregory Younging’s Elements of Indigenous Style. If you are a writer or communicator in this country, you should read this book. It gives practical and clearly explained, organized, and argued advice for best practices when writing about Indigenous subjects or working with Indigenous writers.

I adored Daisy Hay’s book The Young Romantics, and it’s probably what gave me the biography bug. I’ve read that it was her PhD thesis in another form, which surprised me because the prose is so lively and the story so riveting (not something one can usually say about a dissertation). In it, she argues that the archetype of the lone, individualistic, tortured writer—an image invented by the Romantics—was never really true, certainly not by the second generation (the “young” Romantics), and probably not even for the first. She interweaves the stories of Leigh Hunt, Byron, the Shelleys, Keats, and a number of peripheral figures in order to show how they all interacted with and even depended on each other for inspiration, debate, intellectual stimulation, camaraderie, and support. (She also illustrates handily how the women of the circle paid the higher price for their nonconforming ways.) I am officially obsessed with the Romantics again, and if anyone can recommend which is the best biography of Byron, I’m gonna put it high on my list for 2019.

Last, probably my favourite book of 2018 was another one that needs no recommendation from me: Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. It won the Booker, it was made into a miniseries, blah blah blah. These are historical characters I never would have predicted I’d have gotten so attached to. Thomas Cromwell, of course. And Henry VIII! I really missed him when I finished this book. This was one of the behemoths (about 600 pages) that I read this year, but it was worth every page. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to commit to reading the next two installments in 2019… maybe just part 2, Bring Up the Bodies. And, oh, maybe I’ll get the miniseries from the library, too.

Onward to 2019, my friends, and happy reading!

 

2018 Reading Challenge: Part 2

My method of choosing books to read in 2018 looked systematic (I like systems) but had a whole lot of serendipity embedded in it. When I heard about, or remembered, or researched, or otherwise discovered, a book I wanted to read, I looked it up in the public library, and if it was there, I added it to a list in my account. My lists are divided up by subject and genre, to keep them organized. Sometimes, when a book wasn’t in the library but I really, really wanted to read it, I’d put in a purchase request, or else order it from interlibrary loan.

I kept my holds list full, with the holds mostly suspended, and when I took a book out and a hold spot opened up, I’d go to my lists and, rotating through the different subjects and genres, I’d place a new hold on something that took my fancy at the time. I tried to have one longer book and several shorter books checked out at all times.

And how did I find out about these books? Several ways:

• Social media. Even though I am not on it that often any more, the majority of my friends and followees are writerly types who talk about books rather a lot. A lot, but not all, of the books I learn about this way are Canadian books, because that is the world I friend in.
• Goodreads—the platform I have not blocked. Not that many of my friends are on it, but the feed is 100% about books.
• Personal recommendations from friends, colleagues and students IRL.
• Library research on subjects of interest to me, often for writing-related reasons.
• Podcasts. I listen to a number of book-related podcasts to hear about what’s new, and what I’ve previously missed, in the book world. Some of my favourite book shows this year:
  • LeVar Burton Reads. He reads contemporary short stories and has really good taste. Also, he’s LeVar Burton.
  • The New Yorker Fiction Podcast and The Writer’s Voice (respectively, older and newer stories from The New Yorker).
  • Literature and History. This is a podcast about the history of English literature and everything that influenced it. It’s been going on for years and he hasn’t even got to the English language yet. It’s all about totally canonical stuff, but I haven’t read all of that (and it’s been a while since I read what I read). He also recommends scholarly works.
  • Professional Book Nerds (from OverDrive), and Bookworm (from KCRW, with Michael Silverblatt). For book “round-up and interview” shows, those two are my current favourites, though I am also known to listen to the BBC’s, The Guardian’s and the TLS’s book podcasts for British book news, plus a whole slew of other American ones. (And the CBC, too!)

So, how did my semi-managed reading turn out by the numbers in 2018? Here are some percentages; keep in mind they are approximate, since I haven’t thoroughly researched the bio of every author and might not be privy to how they identify. Also, some of my genre attributions are probably debatable.

• About 68% of the creators (usually authors, sometimes illustrators, editors, or translators) were women or non-binary people.
• About 46% were Canadian.
• About 14% were LGBTT*.
• About 25% were BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour).
• About 8% of the books were translated from another language into English.

I gravitate towards books by women, plus the methods by which I get book information—due to the makeup of my friends circle—is going to emphasize books by women and books by Canadians. I need to put more attention towards choosing books by BIPOC, LGBTT*, and non-English-writing creators. My plan is to focus on the third in 2019, since it came in at a measly 8%. I’d love to practice actually reading in French (I used to in university), but I’m afraid that would slow me down a lot on my quest for 95 books. I’m looking at Asymptote for recommendations on new translated books. (Alas, their book club no longer ships to Canada!)

As for genre, here are the significant ones:

• About 35% of the books I read were novels (my first love).
• About 33% were SFF (science fiction and fantasy, though I’ve defined that broadly).
• About 21% were children’s and YA (young adult).
• About 21% were poetry.
• About 20% were in graphic forms (comics).
• About 14% were some form of narrative non-fiction.
• About 14% were based on myth or traditional stories (either presented straight-ahead as non-fiction or retold as fiction).
• About 11% were biography, autobiography or memoir.

For research purposes, I was actually trying to read significant amounts of mythology, YA, and SFF work this year. Those trends will probably continue, though I kind of got the bug for reading biography, what little of it I did.

I probably should have counted the living versus dead authors – but I can tell you the number of dead authors would be small. I also read a tiny bit of mystery, short stories, and informative non-fiction.

Next time: highlights of the year.

2018 Reading Challenge: Part 1

What is this? An actual blog post? Yes, it is, only two years since the last one. The thesis novel I last updated you about is back up to 92,000 words and officially in draft 5 (but who’s counting); yes, I did get my degree, but that doesn’t mean the book is finished. I just compiled that draft 5 MS today, December 31, so I felt it was a good milestone to mention.

But on to other, better books than my unfinished behemoth. Dismayed at my declining reading over the years and feeling distinctly like the internet has been making me lose my ability to read in depth, in 2018 I decided it was time to take on a reading challenge and publicly track my reading, which I did over on Goodreads – DAMN ITS EASE OF USE, AMAZON IS EVIL.

(Self-flagellates.)

Alas, I have not established a new tracking system for 2019.

Though I was most aware of Jonathan Ball’s #95books challenge, I decided to go for the more modest 52 books, a commonly declared challenge on Goodreads. I’m aware that these reading challenge numbers are all relative: to some people (let’s say, most of the students I teach), 52 books in a year might seem like a lofty goal, but to many of my writer and academic friends, not to mention friends who are voracious genre readers, it probably seems laughably small.

While there were times during the year that I fell behind, in the end I made 52 books quite comfortably, with about a month to spare, and then had a very productive December (vacation, air travel), getting my final total to 66. (Actually, it was 67, but there was one book I read early in the year that I wanted to forget and decided to delete from my list in a fit of pique.)

Buoyed by this success, I’m going to try for #95books in 2019. Things I need to keep in mind, given my experience in 2018:

• Read on the bus. I’m lucky that I don’t get motion sick. That’s at least 40 minutes per day reading right there, so long as I don’t get seduced by the news apps.
• Read before bed. Working or going on-line before bed does not help me sleep. Reading is better.
• Stay off social media. My reading time this year shot up when I installed a social blocker which I’ve set so I’m only allowed on social media during limited periods of the day. As a result, no one likes my Facebook posts any more (I’m guessing they are not even seeing them), but who cares, really? I found pretty fast that once I blocked myself, I no longer wanted to go online, and got into the habit of reading instead.
• Less Netflix. It’s so easy to start watching something and binge through a bunch of episodes for hours on the couch. I’ve tried to limit Netflix to two hours per week, and—just like with the social media—I found that after a while I no longer really wanted to go there, to the point that I had to schedule in my two hours so I didn’t completely ignore that form of storytelling.
• Use the library. Not only does the public library offer good tools for organizing lists of books you want to read, the due dates create a deadline and a sense of urgency that I just never have when reading books I own (and believe me, I own a lot). But yes, I actually buy the books by people I know.
• “Book” does not only refer to 600-page epics or weighty literary masterpieces (though those are also good). Only three of the books I read this year were upwards of 500 pages. Au contraire, lots of the books I read were poetry books, children’s books, and comics. I counted the books I read to my daughter for bedtime (five YA novels over the course of the year). I counted the ones she insisted on reading to me (three YA graphic novels which I had to look at over her shoulder). Books are books.

Parts 2 and 3 of this post will break my reading habits down a bit, and then highlight a few of my favourites from 2018.

Taking the Scissors

I got a lot of use out the delete button over the past month while working on my thesis novel.

So far, the thesis process has gone down more or less like this:

1. Draft one: 60,000 words. Written over two summers, including all the outlining and such.
2. Draft two: 89,000 words. Included considerable cutting, so I added well over 30,000 words on the second draft, mainly for plot and character development. Written over one summer—one month, really.
3. Draft three: 66,000 words. I did a few thousand words of cutting at the end of the summer, but mainly this was done over the Christmas break. Included three or four new scenes, but basically it was a cull.

And how sweet the cull is.

I did not cut any chapters. Maybe one or two small scenes went. This was good, old-fashioned dross excision. Big chunks of exposition got the turf, excessive adverbs and adjectives, saying the same thing three ways in case the reader didn’t get it the first time, wordy constructions, all that jazz. It’s by no means perfect – I expect many more drafts to come – but on my way to getting this good enough for thesis submission, I’m pleased with the operation.

I always knew it was theoretically possible to edit away a quarter (at least) of one’s shitty draft without losing anything. I can now vouch that this is true. Same story, three-quarters of the words.

Of course, I’ve still got those words somewhere. O, all those archived files of words we decide not to use! Not to mention all the half-written and abandoned Facebook posts. (Apparently, Facebook keeps them all. Somewhere.)

Before we had a computer at home, we had an electric typewriter with eraser tape. You could backspace and delete letters. This was exciting. When the roll of eraser tape was done, you could unroll it and examine all the letters that had been erased. My sister used to keep all the old rolls. She called it her collection of mistakes.