aka I Hate Recommending Books Because Everyone’s Taste Is So Different, Shaped by Their Own Experiences, But Here We Go Anyways, I Guess
Amy and Isabel by Elizabeth Strout
My beloved Elizabeth Strout’s first novel. Oh I love her so much. The way she peers so carefully and compassionately at ordinary lives, making them seem so familiar and relatable but also startling, fragile, and breathtakingly beautiful. And, per this book, she’s been great at this from the get-go.
Dual Citizens by Alix Ohlin
I expected to like this Canadian Giller prize nominee about the relationship of two sisters through four decades, but mostly I was just a bit bored.
Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout
Oh, sweet mercy. I just wanted to read more really great writing, so I gave myself the gift of this beauty from Strout’s Lucy Barton universe. As expected, I loved it.
Fight Night by Miriam Toews
I really enjoyed this funny and heart-full read about nine-year-old Swiv, navigating the world with her pregnant mother and frail but fighty grandmother. Sad and funny and wise.
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Beautiful, important, and deeply interesting. This is destined to be a classic, and one that I wish everyone would read! There’s a “teen” version out now, if you prefer less words and more pictures, but I suspect you’d miss out on some of her beautiful writing. But, y’know, whatever works. Get it in ya.
The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles
This one was awesome!! Thanks Barack, for the sweet recommendation. It’s a good old-fashioned Story, complete with big gripping plot, fantastic characters, and an actual hero’s journey. There’s so much to like in this book. Beautifully constructed, richly imagined, and highly readable. Go get it.
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
What an odd, but ultimately enjoyable book. A fantasy set in a haunting place just beyond— but wait, it’s probably best if I don’t tell you too much. Discovering what was going on was a big part of the fun! It took me a bit to get settled into this read, but once I did, I didn’t want to leave.
Crossroads by Johnathan Franzen
A big ol book about a family in America in the 70’s. Sympathetic, many-layered characters and plenty of plot make for a very compelling read told with dry humour. Family, religion, ambition, moral quandaries, self-improvement, yada yada yada this book clocks it all. Except it doesn’t! Apparently this is the first of a trilogy! Lots more in store, and I can’t wait to sit down with the Hildebrandts again.
Sea of Tranquility by Emily St John Mandel
This is a really interesting and engaging book, but for some reason I just didn’t really love it. Maybe it was the way it felt a bit detached? Maybe the fact that I loved Cloud Atlas so much and this book feels like a much weaker relation? I mean, check the reviews, I’m pretty alone in my “meh”.
Less by Andrew Sean Greer
HA! What a delight! I totally enjoyed the tale of the putz Arthur Less who I, sadly, really relate to. There’s nothing like great satire, and this one won the Pulitzer for good reason. I’m so looking forward to the new sequel.
The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
Oh, lordy I loved this book. One of my favourites of the year. Marvellous characters (Tookie lives in my heart forever now), an interesting, compelling story, a touch of supernatural, and a lot of great book references.
How High We Go In the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu
This dreamy, riveting read caught me off guard. It was what I wanted from Sea of Tranquility, I think, and then some. Climate catastrophe is at it’s centre, so not a cheery read, but very imaginative and even funny in parts. At any rate, not the total downer one might expect of dystopian lit. I loved it, and will surely reread it.
Lanny by Max Porter
What in the ever loving. The audiobook version is remarkable, but I think even the paper version would be great. This is a super strange one, and something that reads as old-fashioned, fable-like, yet at the same time totally avant-garde. It’s a story about a little boy, told from a variety of perspectives, with inventive, playful language and brilliant insights.
Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart
I love a good Shteyngart- wry, witty, self-deprecating, mocking… all of my favourite feelings. This one had a lot of great aspects, and I did enjoy it, but I think to really get it one might have to have read more Russian literature, particularly Chekhov, who is referenced frequently. And I guess that’s still on my To Do list. Anyways, I laughed a bunch. But less so than with his Lake Success, which was, for me at least, a greater success.
Run Towards the Danger by Sarah Polley
Polley is a very good writer and I did think that this book of essays was a worthy read, but honestly, maybe better read just one essay at a time. Instead, I foolishly read the whole thing at once, so that by the end I was like, wow this rich successful white lady sure complains a lot. But really, her points and her feelings are all valid, and had I just read one at a time, I wouldn’t have felt that way. Definitely worth checking out. Her piece on Ghomeshi was particularly on fire.
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie
This is an exquisite novel, featuring a cast of mostly British Pakistani young adults as they step into their futures, navigating the enormous forces of love, family, and ideology. It’s a bit devastating but so, so worth it.
Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively
Lively won the Booker for this novel back in 1987, so it’s high time I checked it out. What a writer! Her ability to jump back and forth through time, seamlessly, and without confusion, is remarkable. It’s the story of a dying historian as she looks back on her own personal history, so of course I worried it would be a bit dull, but nay it was good as heck.
A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
Normally I have a rule, wherein I must leave at least a year, preferably more, between books by the same author, because otherwise I end up comparing them too much to each other. I’m constantly breaking the rule though, because I am an impatient idiot. Towles’ The Lincoln Highway was just SO good that I had to have more! More! So I read this one, and it too is a big, glorious story with fantastic characters, but… I just didn’t love it as much as Lincoln Highway. Is it because I read them too close together? Maybe. Who knows. Will I ever learn my lesson? Unlikely.
Booth by Karen Joy Fowler
An imagined biography of the Booth family, including one of it’s most famous sons, John Wilkes, the fella that shot Lincoln. Interestingly, though, John Wilkes is not at the centre of this novel, because it turns out that the rest of his family were actually quite interesting, and the author “did not want to write a book about John Wilkes. This is a man who craved attention and has gotten too much of it; I didn’t think he deserved mine.” But in telling the story of his family, and of the people and goings on in America (mostly Baltimore area) at that time, we learn so much about what happened and why. It’s an epic read, great for digging into on cold winter nights.
The Power by Naomi Alderman
A re-read. The concept behind this book, a look into a near-future world where women begin to develop a power that easily gives them the upper hand, is thrilling. It’s a pretty fun story too, compelling, and hard to put down. Added bonus is the great voice of the narrator, if you listen to the audiobook.
The Break by Katherena Vermette
Another amazing read, one of my favourites of the year. This is the story of the women in a Metis family in Winnipeg, and of a terrible crime witnessed by one of them. So in addition to being a very moving portrait of some great characters, it’s a great crime procedural. These are the words that I jotted down in my notebook after reading it: powerful, insightful, moving, funny, comforting, heartbreaking, wow.
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
What a stunning portrait of an interesting character and of the British service class. As it happened, I was reading this when the queen died, and somehow the compassion I felt towards the protagonist, and his lifelong habit of putting his own needs and thoughts away in favour of serving others, allowed me to feel some compassion for QE2, and all those whose lives are dedicated so entirely to supporting an institution rather than to their own personal happiness.
The Glorious Heresies by Lisa McInerney
Again, just another stellar read. I didn’t think I’d like this book, it being about gangsters and drug dealers and other assorted misfits in Cork, Ireland. But, whoa, I enjoyed being very very wrong. This is a fantastic book, hilarious, and moving, and frustrating, and brilliant and the WRITING! Oh my goodness the writing. This is certainly not even the best example by a long shot, but at one point she describes a group of rundown women as having “faces like bags of triangles” and I can NOT get that exquisite description out of my head. There’s a sequel I think now, but I’m forcing myself to wait a wee bit.
Once There Were Wolves by Charlotte McConaghy
A literary mystery about an American/Australian naturalist who moves to rural Scotland where she’s leading a team of naturalists who are re-introducing wolves to the environment. The locals, mostly farmers are not into it. Someone dies. Did the wolves do it? Or one of the locals? It’s a pretty good book, but too bad for it I read it after a slew of greats, so my final answer is “meh”.
Greenwood by Michael Christie
I really enjoyed this read, an entertaining mystery that spans generations, set in the surprisingly interesting world of the Canadian lumber industry.
The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen
To quote the New York Times: “Joshua Cohen’s new novel, “The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family,” is a generational campus novel, an unyielding academic lecture, a rigorous meditation on Jewish identity, an exhaustive meditation on Jewish-American identity, a polemic on Zionism, a history lesson. It is an infuriating, frustrating, pretentious piece of work — and also absorbing, delightful, hilarious, breathtaking and the best and most relevant novel I’ve read in what feels like forever.” It was pretty good. Funny. Academic. Glad I read it, but won’t do it again.
Butter Honey Pig Bread by Francesca Ekwuyani
Oh, I loved this book. The story of twin sisters and their mother, set in Canada and Nigeria and London, is a beautiful story of family and food, relationships, grief, and love. One of the sisters is a chef, so there are some sumptuous food passages that made me nostalgic for Nigerian food that I’d never even heard of. The audiobook offers the added bonus of a beautiful accent.
Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
Well, I just about gave up a few times at the start. The writing is really simplistic, and the story childish. But I decided to stick with it, and it turned out to be a sweet little read. An easy breezy little ditty, it’s set in a cafe in Japan with magical properties that allows patrons to return to moments in their past. Murakami meets an ABC After School Special.
Swing Time by Zadie Smith
This is a good book, but far from Zadie Smith’s best, I’d say. There are a lot of great moments and insightful ideas, but also it felt like it dragged a little to me. It’s about a pair of black girls in London, who are connected by their love of dance and the fact that they are the only black girls in their dance classes. The book follows them through to adulthood, veering off into all sorts of other directions, in a way giving it the feeling of a bunch of novels smooshed together.
When We Lost Our Heads by Heather O’Neill
I tried and tried but I could not make it far in this book. I just hated the writing style, finding it pretentious and boring. I can’t say for sure, but it’s possible that the narrator may have been responsible for ruining it. It’s written in a sort of wry sarcastic style, and that damned narrator over emphasized everything to make sure that we understood that. I found it painful. I may try a paper copy, but, really there are so many other great books to read, so perhaps I’ll just say “not for me”.
Everything Under by Daisy Johnson
A great novel, riffing on ancient myths, set in England’s coastal plains, about a daughter and her unusual mother. The characters in this book are well writ, and nothing out of central casting. The book moves between the present, with the adult daughter looking for her mother who abandoned her years ago, and the past, when the girl and her mother lived on a boat in the river. The language in the book is a character of its own, inventive and crucial in adding to the mystery. Which is what this book ultimately is— a great mystery.
Now Is Not the Time to Panic by Kevin Wilson
Well, let me start by warning you that this is not the giant pile of laughs that I found his previous novel, Nothing to See Here, to be. But it is an interesting story of two teenage misfits who come up with a plan to conquer the boredom of summer in small town Tennessee, and accidentally create some serious chaos. It’s about creativity and teenage friendships, and how we remember the past and are shaped by it. I was honestly a little “meh” about it, until I listened to the author’s note at the end, in which he explains his thoughts and what writing the book meant to him, and now I’m basically in love with both him and this book.
Empire Falls by Richard Russo
I’ve always meant to give Russo a try, so went with this one, his Pulitzer-winning effort from 2001. It was good, a novel about Miles Roby, a man with a once promising future, now stuck in the small Maine town that he grew up in, managing a dying diner in a dying factory town. It’s about the small town life, and about his relationships with the other characters. It’s a pleasant read, mostly, kinda slow, but not in a bad way, just easy and a bit nostalgic. It is definitely of its time, and reminds me of ensemble tv shows and movies of that era.
Middlemarch by George Eliot
You’ll usually see this book on the top 100 novels lists, so high time I read it. Like many of the classics, it took a couple chapters to acclimatize, but once I was in I could have stayed there longer. It follows the lives of a handful of characters in a provincial town in Victorian England, and their hopes, motivations, fears, and relationships— the realistic complications of human lives. This realness meant that rather than feeling dry and dusty, the book felt relevant, insightful, and compelling. George Eliot was the original Elizabeth Strout, and I’m looking forward to reading more.
A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
I didn’t realize that rather than a typical novel, this is really a collection of sort-of-connected short stories, so I was quite confused for a bit. It’s clearly well-written, and had some interesting parts, but ultimately left me a bit cold. With no single character to hold onto, no plot to dive into, it felt a bit like treading water. That being said, it’s won bunches of big awards, so I’m possibly just straight up wrong.
A Town Called Solace by Mary Lawson
This is a lovely novel, told from the perspectives of a young girl who’s big sister has run away, her elderly next door neighbour who has gone into the hospital, and the man who moves into her neighbour’s house. It’s about family, that which we’re born with and that which we create, reckoning with the past, childhood, grief… all beautifully told.
Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu
A playful novel, satirizing Hollywood, while sharply critiquing its tropes and stereotypes. It’s remarkable for its ability to maintain a light and funny feel while expressing a personal and heartfelt rage and grief at the real consequences of racism.
Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
Ok, I’m only halfway through, so don’t tell me anything! So far, so good. Shuggie is a lad growing up in a Glaswegian tenement with his alcoholic mother. While that does sound pretty heavy, and sure, it is, it’s actually very funny and compassionate. His other family members figure prominently, including his father, who I would really like to throttle. Looking forward to seeing where this goes.
That’s it! 37 and a half, but who’s counting. So, please, tell me what you’ve read, what you loved and hated. Barack Obama has his new list out, and there are a few on there that I’m excited to get into. I’ve also just had a look at the NYT top ten of 2022 list, and I haven’t read a one, and among their 100 favourites, the only one I’ve read is Sea of Tranquility (see?? I am the only living person who did not love that book). So, so many great reads ahead!