suchagiantnerd

[suchagiantnerd]

28 Books, 1 Year

Well, 2020, amirite? Staying home with a 4-year-old and a baby really decreased my reading time, bringing me to my lowest total ever since starting this blog. Here we go!

1. Her Body and Other Parties / Carmen Maria Machado

I rarely feel stupid when reading fiction, but this collection of short stories left me feeling pretty stupid. Machado's writing is visceral and gorgeous but what she's trying to say is mostly beyond me. Overall, the collection (as evident by the title) looks at the ways existing in a woman's body is fraught. Sometimes we want to escape our bodies, often our bodies are harmed or taken advantage of against our will, sometimes our bodies fail us. But as for the more nitty-gritty takeaways, I couldn't get there. One story in particular is staying with me. In it, Machado invents new summaries of each and every episode of Law & Order: SVU, telling a tale of a living, breathing New York City that requires regular blood sacrifices and in which everyone has a doppelgänger. I liked it, but definitely didn't get it.

2. Moon of the Crusted Snow / Waubgeshig Rice

This wonderfully chilling read takes place on a remote reserve in Northern Ontario. Over the course of a few days, cell service stops, the internet goes down, and the power goes out. With no communication possible with other communities, the reserve's residents can only guess at what may be occurring down south. As autumn creeps toward winter, the snow piles up and panic sets in. Eventually, a visitor arrives via snowmobile and confirms the residents' worst fears about the state of civilization while also asking to stay on in the community. Can he be trusted? Will others follow? This was a tense page-turner looking at the importance of community, preparedness and leadership.

3. Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar / Cheryl Strayed

Dear Sugar's advice to a person who didn't know whether or not he wanted kids is what turned me onto her. The answer was perfect. For someone on the fence, there is no right answer, no wrong answer. But there was a simple beauty to the way she said this. In this advice column collection, Sugar answers questions about love, parenthood, friendship, loss, death, finances, education, hopes and dreams. She insists again and again that we open our hearts and give forgiveness a chance while still maintaining healthy boundaries. And through her answers (and anecdotes) she showers love and care on so many devastated readers who are often writing to her as a last resort.

4. Girlfriend in a Coma / Douglas Coupland

We start the action with a Breakfast Club-type group of teens at a party in 1979 Vancouver. One of them, Karen, ends the night in a coma and doesn’t wake up for 16 YEARS. Also, turns out she was pregnant, and gives birth while in the coma. Richard, her boyfriend, raises their daughter with the help of his parents and friends, and by the time Karen wakes up again, the world has gone downhill. Not long after she wakes up, everyone starts falling asleep and dying except for the original group of friends and Karen’s daughter. I liked this novel as I’m a sucker for everything dystopian, but I also had to ask WHY? Why this random group of teens out of all the world? Why did Karen have to be in a coma for so long? How does it tie into the apocalypse? I still don’t know guys. I still don’t know.

5. How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence / Michael Pollan

Back in the 1960s, research on LSD was banned thanks to a moral panic. But today, scientists and therapists are starting to study its uses again. Pollan takes a deep dive into the future of LSD, psilocybin (certain mushrooms, and if I remember correctly, a substance that a certain toad secretes?!) and DMT, taking various trips himself with the help of trained guides. His vivid descriptions of each trip were the highlight of the book, and I find myself, someone who has never tried anything other than pot, wanting to try microdosing in the future.

6. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine / Gail Honeyman

The first of two contrarian reviews this year, I really didn’t like this book. I found Eleanor’s character and quirks completely unbelievable, and even discovered a little hole in the plot demonstrating that she can’t be as out of touch with pop culture as Honeyman claims she is (which I can’t reveal to you because it’s also a spoiler). I think my issue is that as far as I know, the author is not neurodivergent, whereas Eleanor is. I think this does a real disservice to readers, and would much prefer to read something like this by a neurodivergent author.

7. The Story of the Lost Child / Elena Ferrante

I finally finished the Neapolitan Quartet series! The fourth and final book finds Elena and Lila in their thirties and follows them until they’re in their sixties as they navigate professional successes and failures, new aspects of motherhood, relationship woes, and a fraying friendship. The dynamics of the friendship at the core of this series speak to me so deeply and captures so much about the passion, tension, tenderness, and competition that lurk within a longtime platonic relationship.

8. The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle / Stuart Turton

Dare I describe this as Downton Abbey meets Black Mirror? Aidan Bishop wakes up on the same date and in the same setting every day (Blackheath Manor on Evelyn Hardcastle’s birthday) but as a different guest or employee each time. Each night, Evelyn Hardcastle is murdered. Aidan quickly learns that his task is to find the murderer, using the different skillsets and vantage points he inherits with each subsequent body. The tension! The twists! The gorgeous setting! I loved this winding, wild novel.

9. You Were Born for This: Astrology for Radical Self-Acceptance / Chani Nicholas

If you are an astrology lover and don’t know who Chani Nicholas is, you’ve been living under a rock! Follow this woman! Her practice and guidance is so inclusive - feminist, anti-racist, anti-transphobic, body positive, and all about how to discover and lean into your gifts and talents while keeping in mind the greater good and working toward a more progressive society.

10. An Ocean of Minutes / Thea Lim

I started reading this dystopian novel about a pandemic right at the start of the pandemic! Maybe not a wise decision, but it didn’t matter, because this book is a beautiful, moving read. In the near future, young couple Polly and Frank find themselves stranded in Galveston, Texas, when a deadly virus begins sweeping across the globe. Frank gets sick, and the only way that Polly can pay for his expensive life-saving treatment is if she signs up as a bonded laborer and travels to the future (yes, time-travel exists!) The couple agree to meet up in 12 years (which will really be just a few short days for Polly). However, Polly is send an extra five years into the future, and Frank is nowhere to be found. The worry I felt! Polly’s loneliness and confusion in the future! Will they find each other again? Oh boy, this was an emotional ride!

11. Where the Crawdads Sing / Delia Owens

The second of my two contrarian reviews this year, I also really disliked this book, which everyone else and their mother seemed to adore? It was bad! The plot felt really contrived, the characters were two-dimensional, and I felt icky about the author’s two Black characters and how the protagonist, Kya, interacted with them. I don’t think Delia is informed enough about the realities of the Black experience, then and now, to responsibly write Black characters. Also, the ‘twist ending’ was a snooze fest. The one redeeming factor was the author’s palpable love of and knowledge about nature. I really did enjoy reading about the coastal habitat and sea life that the Kya loved so much. Oh, what’s this novel about, you ask? It’s a combo coming-of-age / murder mystery set in the 1950s and 60s.

12. The Skin We’re In: A Year of Black Resistance and Power / Desmond Cole

Cole is a Canadian journalist and activist shining a much needed light on racism in this country. In this book, he highlights one incidence of systemic racism in action per month during the year of 2017, focussing on police brutality, harm caused by school boards and educators, the Canada 150 celebrations, and unjust immigration policies. This book packs a punch and Cole’s writing style is really accessible. It’s a great entry point into learning about the realities of racism in Canada.

13. Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds / Adrienne Maree Brown

I absolutely loved this book, though I find it hard to pin down. At its core, it encourages us to think more deeply and holistically about nature, social justice, and community. Brown is heavily influenced by Black sci-fi / dystopian master Octavia Butler, specifically Butler’s ideas around “shaping change” while living through change. It’s full of gems of wisdom, like this quote, which is one of my favourites: “Imagination is one of the spoils of colonization, which in many ways is claiming who gets to imagine the future for a given geography.” As Brown also writes about, and which we can really see in this moment, we are currently living through the tail-end of a dying society, imagined by a small few. What could we create together if everyone’s imaginings carried equal weight?

14. From the Ashes: My Story of Being Métis, Homeless, and Finding My Way / Jesse Thistle

Thistle’s emotional and turbulent memoir begins with a loving memory of his time as a little boy at his maternal grandparents’ home. Not long after, his parents moved the family away from their Métis community and Jesse and his two brothers soon end up in the foster care system. This experience, though relatively brief, absolutely traumatized all three of them. Later, they end up living with their paternal grandparents, who love them deeply but are extremely strict, which doesn’t work for Thistle. He hits various rock bottoms, battling with addiction, trauma and homelessness at the intersection of racism. And somehow, he manages to break free of these harmful cycles, go back to school, and become an academic and best-selling author.

15. Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present / Robyn Maynard

I would call this a must-read for Canadians. Maynard breaks down exactly how Canada surveils and punishes Blackness despite its claims of inclusivity and tolerance. She explores policing, yes, but also social work, education, immigration, and education and it’s impossible not to see the levers of systemic racism at work everywhere. Fair warning though, this is a more academic text and requires real concentration.

16. Jhumpa Lahiri / Unaccustomed Earth

This collection of short stories (the last being more of a novella) was gripping. I somehow fell in love with almost all of the characters. Lahiri writes people so skillfully. I felt their longing, hope, sorrow, grief, excitement. Most of the tales take place within the Indian community in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but some stories take us further afield. Lahiri picks a key relationship to focus on within each story - daughter/father, sister/brother, two roommates, childhood acquaintances - and lays them out gently under her microscope for us to see in all their intricate complexity.

17. Midnight Sun / Stephenie Meyer

Did you guys know I’m a Twihard? Having read all the Twilight novels (multiple times) way before I started this blog, this may be new information. But I’m a huge, pathetic fan and though I love Jacob, I will always be Team Edward. So OF COURSE I had to read this extremely long-awaited book, which is actually Twilight, but from Edward’s point of view rather than Bella’s. It was genuinely enjoyable, but not filled with nearly enough sexual tension for my liking. And of course, never ever read it unless you are also a Twilight fan.

18. The Sun and Her Flowers / Rupi Kaur

It’s Rupi being Rupi! I legitimately enjoy Rupi’s poetry, but I don’t love it. Some of the pieces really resonate, and others do nothing for me. But I do think she’s an important voice for young women, and specifically young women of colour. So much of her writing is about reclaiming your power, honouring the older generation of women who sacrificed so much and received nothing in return, and learning to love yourself in a society that is constantly trying to hurt you. Her poetry is always an uplifting read.

19. Conscious Creativity: Look, Connect, Create / Philippa Stanton

I’ve been following Philippa on Instagram for years as I adore her flat-lays and domestic foraging arrangements (if you follow me on IG, you may have seen my colour-themed #DomesticForaging homages to her work!) So when she published a book outlining her own creative process (and containing tons of her gorgeous photography), I had to read it. Stanton has included lots of activities meant to light your creative spark and inspire new ways of looking at things. She also writes about her experiences as a synesthete (someone who may “see” music as colours or who may “hear” shapes), which was fascinating. This is a book I’ll certainly go back to when I’m feeling uninspired. Want to follow her on IG? Her handle is @5tfinf.

20. Turkey Trot Murder / Leslie Meier

Guys, this review is the start of something BIG. Brad knows that I love to read books that are “in season” (I don’t want to read a book set in the summer during the winter, etc.). So he bought me this very niche Thanksgiving mystery novel to read in October. It’s alllll fluff, and very much in the “so bad it’s good” category. It also turns out that Leslie Meier may be one of the most prolific authors of all time, and so Brad signed me up to her “book of the month” fan club for my birthday this year, meaning I get a new, seasonally appropriate Meier classic each month. (You should also know that the “book of the month” fan club is entirely made up, and the letters from Leslie are actually written by Brad, and yes, he has designed a logo for the letterhead.)

21. Haunted House Murder / Leslie Meier and Lee Hollis and Barbara Ross

Wait, what? THREE authors? Yes, some of the Leslie Meier classics are actually novellas, so they are combined with novellas by two other authors into these seasonal collections. Also, Lee Hollis isn’t even real. Lee Hollis is in fact TWO PEOPLE, a brother/sister writing duo! So there are four authors involved in this spooky little collection. They all take place in small-town Maine, so yes, the settings are adorable and the plots are terrible.

22. Autumn / Karl Ove Knausgaard

I think I would describe this memoir (?) as a collection of magical noticings. While his wife is pregnant with their fourth baby, Knausgaard starts writing letters to the unborn child, telling them about, well, everything and anything. That project turned into this book, in which the writer observes everyday things like hands, toilets, fog, petrol, and snakes, and finds the beauty and wonder in all of them. Reading this book left me feeling very inspired and wanting to try and develop this skill in myself as I write.

23. The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century / Kirk Wallace Johnson

Back in 2009, Edwin Rist stole HUNDREDS of dead birds from the British Museum of Natural History. That fact alone is mind-boggling (how?), but it gets wilder. He didn’t steal them for nerdy science reasons, he stole them to sell to the Victorian fly-tying community. Yes, flies as in the things you attach to fish hooks. And no, not flies that will actually be used, but flies that are constructed as a hobby and art form. Wallace Johnson does a great job of conveying Rist’s obsessive passion for fly-tying and the desperation many fly-tiers feel as they try to track down increasingly rare and protected feathers from exotic (or extinct) birds. The author also has a journalist’s nose for sniffing out lies and half-truths and even tracks down Rist himself for a sit-down interview. I was riveted throughout the whole book, which lives at the intersection of history, science, mystery, and psychological deep-dive.

24. Yule Log Murder / Leslie Meier and Lee Hollis and Barbara Ross

The seasonal fluff dream team is back! And yes, a yule log features prominently in each novella. Once as a murder weapon, and once as a suspected murder weapon! These books also feature real recipes, some of which actually look pretty tasty!

25. Empire of Wild / Cherie Dimaline

This was a chilling page-turner and the second novel of Dimaline’s that I’ve read and devoured. She’s quickly become one of my favourite authors. In this story, Joan, a Métis woman living in the Georgian Bay area, is at the tail-end of the worst year of her life. Almost a year ago, her husband Victor disappeared into thin air after a rare argument between the couple, and Joan’s been searching for him ever since. One day, she wanders past a Christian revival tent in a Walmart parking lot, and the minister is the spitting image of Victor. She manages to have a brief conversation with him and it appears he has no memory of her or his prior life. Yet, in her gut, she KNOWS it’s him and resolves to return him to himself (and to her). This slow-burning horror novel weaves in the Métis myth of the Rogarou, a werewolf-ish creature who walks lonely roads looking for victims, to great effect.

26. Eggnog Murder / Leslie Meier and Lee Hollis and Barbara Ross

Another seasonal romp in which this time, the eggnog is the murder weapon in TWO of the stories! TWO PEOPLE IN TWO SEPARATE STORIES DIE FROM DRINKING NUT MILK EGGNOG AND NOT KNOWING IT WAS NUT MILK AND SUFFERING FROM A NUT ALLERGY. Anyways, I actually made one of the included recipes this time - eggnog muffins - and they were truly delicious!

27. Watch Over Me / Nina LaCour

This is a beautiful and haunting (both literally and figuratively) YA novel about the way trauma from our past follows us around, haunting our present. Mila, who’s just aged out of the foster care system, lands what seems to be a perfect job helping to teach younger children at a farm in Northern California. The farm is owned by an older couple who’ve become somewhat famous for taking in dozens of kids from the foster system over the years. Upon arrival, Mila falls in love, but soon starts to notice strange things about the way things are done on the farm, while also suffering from PTSD related to her own childhood traumas. Is there something sinister going on, or could this beautiful, isolated place become the home Mila’s always longed for?

28. Phases / h.duxbury

I started writing poetry again this summer, and quickly found lots of other poets sharing their work on Instagram. @hduxburypoetry (a fellow Ontarian, too!) quickly became one of my favourite accounts to follow, so when i learned that she self-published a poetry collection, I had to grab a copy. Her work is heavily inspired by nature and the changing seasons, which I’m a sucker for, so I really enjoyed it. Her poems also delve into grief, loneliness, love, and growth.

Well, there you have it! As for my 2020 faves, my top three reads were:

Empire of Wild

Unaccustomed Earth

Emergent Strategy

[suchagiantnerd]

48 Books, 1 Year

I was just two books shy of my annual goal of 50! You can blame the combination of my adorable newborn, who refused to nap anywhere except on me, and Hallmark Christmas movie season, during which I abandon books for chaste kisses between 30-somethings who behave like tweens at places called the Mistletoe Inn (which are really in Almonte, Ontario). 

Without further ado, as Zuma from Paw Patrol says, “Let’s dive in!”

1. Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes / Nathan H. Lents

We have too many bones! We have to rely too much on our diet for survival! We suffer from too many cognitive biases! Reading about our design flaws was kind of interesting, but the best part of this book were the few pages toward the end about the possibility of alien life. Specifically this quote: "...some current estimates predict that the universe harbours around seventy-five million civilizations." WHAT?! This possibility more than anything else I've ever heard or read gives me a better idea of how infinite the universe really is.

2. The Fiery Cross / Diana Gabaldon

Compared to the first four books in the Outlander series, this fifth book is a real snooze. The characters are becoming more and more unlikeable. They're so self-centered and unaware of their privilege in the time and place they're living. Gabaldon's depictions of the Mohawk tribe and other First Nations characters (which I'm reading through her character's opinions of things) are pretty racist. The enslaved people at one character's plantation are also described as being well taken care of and I just.... can't. I think this is the end of my affair with Outlander.

3. Educated / Tara Westover

This memoir was a wild ride. Tara Westover grew up in a survivalist, ultra-religious family in rural Idaho. She didn’t go to school and was often mislead about the outside world by her father. She and her siblings were also routinely put in physical danger working in their father’s junkyard as their lives were “in god’s hands”, and when they were inevitably injured, they weren’t taken to the hospital or a doctor, but left to be treated by their healer mother. Thanks to her sheer intelligence and determination (and some support from her older brother), Tara goes to university and shares with us the culture shock of straddling two very different worlds. My non-fiction book club LOVED this read, we talked about it for a long, long time.

4. Imbolc: Rituals, Recipes and Lore for St. Brigid’s Day / Carl F. Neal

Continuing with my witchy education, I learned all about the first sabbat of the new year, Imbolc.

5. Super Sad True Love Story / Gary Shteyngart

This in-the-very-near-future dystopian novel got my heart racing during a few exciting moments, but overall, I couldn’t immerse myself fully because of the MISOGYNY. I think the author might not like women and the things women like (or the things he thinks they like?) In this near future, all the dudes are into finance or are media celeb wannabes, while all the women work in high-end retail. And onion-skin jeans are the new trend for women - they are essentially see-through. Gary….we don’t…want that? We don’t even want low-rise jeans to come back.

6. The Wanderers / Meg Howrey

Helen, Yoshi and Sergei are the three astronauts selected by a for-profit space exploration company to man the world’s first mission to Mars. But before they get the green light, they have to endure a 17-month simulation. In addition to getting insight into the simulation from all three astronauts via rotating narrators, we also hear from the astronauts’ family members and other employees monitoring the sim. At times tense, at times thoughtful, this book is an incisive read about what makes explorers willing to leave behind everything they love the most in the world.

7. Zone One / Colson Whitehead

The zombie apocalypse has already happened, and Mark is one of the survivors working to secure and clean up Zone One, an area of Manhattan. During his hours and hours of boring shifts populated by a few harrowing minutes here and there, the reader is privy to Mark’s memories of the apocalypse itself and how he eventually wound up on this work crew. Mark is a pretty likeable, yet average guy rather than the standard zombie genre heroes, and as a result, his experiences also feel like a more plausible reality than those of the genre.

8. Homegoing / Yaa Gyasi

One of my favourite reads of the year, this novel is the definition of “sweeping epic”. The story starts off with two half-sisters (who don’t even know about each other’s existence) living in 18th-century Ghana. One sister marries a white man and stays in Ghana, living a life of privilege, while the other is sold into slavery and taken to America on a slave ship. This gigantic split in the family tree kicks off two parallel and vastly different narratives spanning EIGHT generations, ending with two 20-somethings in the present day. I remain in awe of Gyasi’s talent, and was enthralled throughout the entire book.

9. Sweetbitter / Stephanie Danler

Tess moves to New York City right out of school (and seemingly has no ties to her previous life - this bothered me, I wanted to know more about her past) and immediately lands a job at a beloved (though a little tired) fancy restaurant. Seemingly loosely based on Danler’s own experiences as a server, I got a real feel for the insular, incestuous, chaotic life in “the industry”. Tess navigates tensions between the kitchen and the front of house, falls for the resident bad-boy bartender, and positions herself as the mentee of the older and more glamorous head server, who may not be everything she seems. This is a juicy coming-of-age novel.

10. The Autobiography of Gucci Mane / Gucci Mane and Neil Martinez-Belkin

Gucci Mane is one of Atlanta’s hottest musicians, having helped bring trap music to the mainstream. I’d never heard of him until I read this book because I’m white and old! But not knowing him didn’t make this read any less interesting. In between wild facts (if you don’t get your music into the Atlanta strip clubs, your music isn’t making it out of Atlanta) and wilder escapades (Gucci holing himself up in his studio, armed to the teeth, in a fit of paranoia one night) Gucci Mane paints on honest picture of a determined, talented artist fighting to break free of a cycle of systemic racism and poverty.

11. I’ll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman’s Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer / Michelle McNamara

McNamara was a journalist and true crime enthusiast who took it upon herself to try and solve the mystery of the Golden State Killer’s identity. Amazingly, her interest in this case also sparked other people’s interest in looking back at it, eventually leading to the arrest of the killer (though tragically, McNamara died a few months before the arrest and would never know how her obsession helped to capture him). This is a modern true crime classic and a riveting read.

12. A Great Reckoning / Louise Penny

The 12th novel in Penny’s Inspector Gamache mystery series sees our hero starting a new job teaching cadets at Quebec’s police academy. Of course, someone is murdered, and Gamache and his team work to dig the rot out of the institution, uncovering a killer in the process.

13. Any Man / Amber Tamblyn

Yes, this novel is by THAT Amber Tamblyn, star of “The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants”! Anyway, this book is a tad bit darker, and follows five men who’ve been victimized by the female serial rapist, who calls herself Maude. Going into this read I though that it might be some sort of revenge fantasy, but dudes, not to worry - we really feel awful for the male victims and see them in all their complexity. Perhaps, if more men read this book, they might better understand the trauma female and non-binary victims go through? That would require men to read books by women though. Guys? GUYS???

14. Ostara: Rituals, Recipes and Lore for the Spring Equinox / Kerri Connor

Yet another witchy read providing more information about this Spring sabbat. 

15. Scarborough / Catherine Hernandez

This novel takes place in OUR Scarborough! Following the lives of a number of residents (adults and children alike), the plot centres around the families attending an Ontario Early Years program as well as the program facilitator. Hernandez looks at the ways poverty, mental illness, addiction, race, and homophobia intersect within this very multicultural neighbourhood. It’s very sad, but there are also many sweet and caring moments between the children and within each of the families.

16. The Glitch / Elisabeth Cohen

Shelley Stone (kind of a fictional Sheryl Sandberg type) is the CEO of Conch, a successful Silicon Valley company. Like many of these over-the-top real-life tech execs, Shelley has a wild schedule full of business meetings, exercise, networking and parenting, leaving her almost no time to rest. While on an overseas business trip, she meets a younger woman also named Shelley Stone, who may or may not be her younger self. Is Shelley losing it? This is a dark comedy poking fun at tech start-up culture and the lie that we can have it all.

17. The Thirteenth Tale / Diane Setterfield

This is my kind of book! A young and inexperienced bookworm is handpicked to write the biography of an aging famous author, Vida Wynter. Summoned to her sprawling country home around Christmastime, the biographer is absolutely enthralled by Vida’s tales of a crumbling gothic estate and an eccentric family left too long to their own whims. Looking for a dark, twisty fairytale? This read’s for you.

18. Love & Misadventure / Lang Leav

Leav’s book of poems looked appealing, but for me, her collection fell short. I felt like I was reading a teenager’s poetry notebook (which I’m not criticizing, I love that teen girls write poetry, and surprise, surprise - so did I - but I’m too old for this kind of writing now).

19. Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows / Balli Kaur Jaswal

Hooo boy, my book club loved this one! Hoping to get a job more aligned with her literary interests, Nikki, the 20-something daughter of Indian immigrants to Britain, takes a job teaching writing at the community centre in London’s biggest Punjabi neighbourhood. The students are all older Punjabi women who don’t have much to do and because of their “widow” status have been somewhat sidelined within their community. Without anyone around to censor or judge them, the widows start sharing their own erotic fantasies with each other, each tale wilder than the last. As Nikki gets to know them better, she gains some direction in life and starts a romance of her own. (It should be noted that in addition to this lovely plot, there is a sub plot revolving around a possible honour killing in the community. For me, the juxtaposition of these two plots was odd, but not odd enough that it ruined the book.)

20. Beltane: Rituals, Recipes and Lore for May Day / Melanie Marquis

Beltane marks the start of the summer season in the witches’ year, and I learned all about how to ring it in, WITCH STYLE.

21. Summer of Salt / Katrina Leno

This book is essentially Practical Magic for teens, with a queer protagonist. All that to say, it’s enjoyable and sweet and a win for #RepresentationMatters, but it wasn’t a surprising or fresh story.

22. Too Like the Lightning / Ada Palmer

This is the first in the Terra Ignota quartet of novels, which is (I think) speculative fiction with maybe a touch of fantasy and a touch of sci-fi and a touch of theology and certainly a lot of philosophical ruminating too. I both really enjoyed it and felt so stupid while reading it. As a lifelong bookworm who doesn’t shy away from difficult reads, I almost never feel stupid while reading, but this book got me. The world building is next level and as soon as you think you’ve found your footing, Palmer pulls the rug out from under you and you’re left both stunned and excited about her latest plot twist. Interested in finding out what a future society grouped into ‘nations’ by interests and passions (instead of geographical borders and ethnicity) might be like? Palmer takes a hearty stab at it here.

23. The Trauma Cleaner: One Woman’s Extraordinary Life in the Business of Death, Decay and Disaster / Sarah Krasnostein

When Sarah Krasnostein met Sandra Pankhurst, she knew she had to write her biography (or something like it - this book is part biography, part love letter, part reckoning). And rightly so, as Sandra has led quite a life. She grew up ostracized within her own home by her immediate family, married and had children very young, came out as a trans woman and begin living as her authentic self (but abandoning her own young family in the process), took to sex work and lived through a vicious assault, married again, and started up her own successful company cleaning uncleanable spaces - the apartments of hoarders, the houses of recluses, the condos in which people ended their own lives. Sandra is the definition of resilience, but all her traumas (both the things people have done to her and the things she’s done to others) have left their mark, as Krasnostein discovers as she delicately probes the recesses of Sandra’s brain.

24. Becoming / Michelle Obama

My favourite things about any memoir from an ultra-famous person are the random facts that surprise you along the way. In this book, it was learning that all American presidents travel with a supply of their blood type in the event of an assassination attempt. I mean OF COURSE they would, but that had never occurred to me. I also appreciated Michelle opening up about her fertility struggles, the difficult decision to put her career on hold to support Barack’s dreams, and the challenge of living in the spotlight with two young children that you hope to keep down to earth. Overall, I think Michelle was as candid as someone in her position can be at this point in her life.

25 and 26. Seven Surrenders, The Will to Battle / Ada Palmer

I decided to challenge myself and stick with Palmer’s challenging Terra Ignota series, also reading the second and third instalments (I think the fourth is due to be released this year). I don’t know what to say, other than the world-building continues to be incredible and this futuristic society is on the bring of something entirely new.

27. Even Vampires Get the Blues / Kate MacAlister

This novel wins for “cheesiest read of the year”. When a gorgeous half-elf detective (you read that right) meets a centuries-old sexy Scottish vampire, sparks fly! Oh yeah, and they’re looking for some ancient thing in between having sex.

28. A Case of Exploding Mangoes / Mohammed Hanif

A piece of historical fiction based on the real-life suspicious plane crash in 1988 that killed many of Pakistan’s top military brass, this novel lays out many possible culprits (including a crow that ate too many mangoes). It’s a dark comedy taking aim at the paranoia of dictators and the boredom and bureaucracy of the military (and Bin Laden makes a cameo at a party).

29. Salvage the Bones / Jesmyn Ward

This novel takes place in the steaming hot days before Hurricane Katrina hits the Mississippi coast. The air is still and stifling and Esch’s life in the small town of Bois Sauvage feels even more stifled. Esch is 14 and pregnant and hasn’t told anyone yet. Her father is a heavy drinker and her three brothers are busy with their own problems. But as the storm approaches, the family circles around each other in preparation for the storm. This is a jarring and moving read made more visceral by the fact that the author herself survived Katrina. It’s also an occasionally violent book, and there are particularly long passages about dog-fighting (a hobby of one of the brothers). The dog lovers in my book club found it hard to get through, consider this your warning!

30. Everything’s Trash, But It’s Okay / Phoebe Robinson

A collection of essays in the new style aka writing multiple pages on a topic as though you were texting your best friend about it (#ImFineWithThisNewStyleByTheWay #Accessible), Robinson discusses love, friendship, being a Black woman in Hollywood, being plus-ish-size in Hollywood, and Julia Roberts teaching her how to swim (and guys, Julia IS as nice in real life as we’d all hoped she was!) Who is Robinson? Comedy fans will likely know her already, but I only knew her as one of the stars of the Netflix film Ibiza (which I enjoyed). This is a fun, easy read!

31. Midsummer: Rituals, Recipes and Lore for Litha / Deborah Blake

After reading this book, I charged my crystals under the midsummer sun!

32. Fingersmith / Sarah Waters

So many twists! So many turns! So many hidden motives and long-held secrets! Think Oliver Twist meets Parasite meets Lost! (Full disclosure, I haven’t seen Parasite yet, I’m just going off all the chatter about it). Sue is a con artist orphan in old-timey London. When the mysterious “Gentleman” arrives at her makeshift family’s flat with a proposal for the con of all cons, Sue is quickly thrust into a role as the servant for another young woman, Maud, living alone with her eccentric uncle in a country estate. As Sue settles into her act, the lines between what she’s pretending at and what she’s really feeling start to blur, and nothing is quite what it seems. This book is JUICY!

33. Rest Play Grow: Making Sense of Preschoolers (Or Anyone Who Acts Like One) / Deborah MacNamara, PhD

I read approximately one parenting book a year, and this was this year’s winner. As my eldest approached her third birthday, we started seeing bigger and bigger emotions and I wasn’t sure how to handle them respectfully and gently. This book gave me a general roadmap for acknowledging her feelings, sitting through them with her, and the concept of “collecting” your child to prevent tantrums from happening or to help calm them down afterward. I’ll be using this approach for the next few years!

34. Lughnasadh: Rituals, Recipes and Lore for Lammas / Melanie Marquis

And with this read, I’ve now read about the entire witch’s year. SO MOTE IT BE.

35. In Cold Blood / Truman Capote

How had I not read this until now? This true-crime account that kicked off the modern genre was rich in detail, compassionate to the victims, and dug deep into the psyche of the killers. The descriptions of the midwest countryside and the changing seasons also reminded me of Keith Morrison’s voiceovers on Dateline. Is Capote his inspiration?

36. I’m Afraid of Men / Vivek Shraya

A quick, short set of musings from trans musician and writer Shraya still packs an emotional punch. She writes about love and loss, toxic masculinity, breaking free of gender norms, and what it’s like to exist as a trans woman.

37. The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You / Elaine N. Aron, PhD

Having long thought I might be a highly sensitive person (lots of us are!), I decided to learn more about how to better cope with stressful situations when I don’t have enough alone time or when things are too loud or when I get rattled by having too much to do any of the other myriad things that shift me into panic mode. Though some of the advice is a bit too new-agey for me (talking to your inner child, etc), some of it was practical and useful.

38. Swamplandia! / Karen Russell

The family-run alligator wrestling theme park, Swamplandia, is swimming in debt and about to close. The widowed father leaves the everglades for the mainland in a last-ditch attempt to drum up some money, leaving the three children to fend for themselves. A dark coming-of-age tale that blends magic realism, a ghost story, the absurd and a dangerous boat trip to the centre of the swamplands, this novel examines a fractured family mourning its matriarch in different ways.

39. A Mind Spread Out on the Ground / Alicia Elliott

This is a beautiful collection of personal essays brimming with vulnerability, passion, and fury. Elliott, the daughter of a Haudenosaunee father and a white mother, shares her experiences growing up poor in a family struggling with mental illness, addiction and racism. Topics touch on food scarcity, a never-ending battle with lice, parenthood and the importance of hearing from traditionally marginalized voices in literature. 

40. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay / Elena Ferrante

The third novel in Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet sees Elena and Lila move from their early twenties into their thirties and deal with a riot of issues - growing careers, changing political beliefs, the challenges of motherhood and romantic relationships, and existing as strong-willed, intelligent women in 1960s and 70s Italy. I’ll definitely finish the series soon.

41. Half-Blood Blues / Esi Edugyan

A small group of American and German jazz musicians working on a record find themselves holed up in Paris as the Germans begin their occupation in WW2. Hiero, the youngest and most talented member of the group, goes out one morning for milk and is arrested by the Germans, never to be heard from again. Fifty years later, the surviving members of the band go to Berlin for the opening night of a documentary about the jazz scene from that era, and soon find themselves on a road trip through the European countryside to find out what really became of Hiero all those years ago. Edugyan’s novel is a piercing examination of jealousy, ambition, friendship, race and guilt. And features a cameo by Louis Armstrong!

42. A Serial Killer’s Daughter: My Story of Faith, Love and Overcoming / Kerri Rawson

So Brad and I had just finished watching season 2 of Mindhunter, and as I browse through a neighbourhood little library, I spot this book and the serial killer in question is the BTK Killer! Naturally, I had to read it. What I didn’t realize is that this is actually a Christian book, so Rawson does write a lot about struggling with her belief in God and finding her way back to Him, etc. But there are also chapters more fitting with the true crime and memoir genres that I equally enjoyed and was creeped out by.

43. The Night Ocean / Paul La Farge

This is another book that made me feel somewhat stupid as a reader. I just know there are details or tidbits that completely went over my head that would likely enrich a better reader’s experience. In broad strokes, the novel is about a failed marriage between a psychiatrist and a writer who became dangerously obsessed with H.P. Lovecraft and the rumours that swirled around him and his social circle. The writer’s obsession takes him away from his marriage and everything else, and eventually it looks like he ends his own life. The psychiatrist is doubtful (no body was found) and she starts to follow him down the same rabbit hole. At times tense, at times funny, at times sad, I enjoyed the supposed world of Lovecraft and his fans and peers, but again, I’m sure there are deeper musings here that I couldn’t reach.

44. Glass Houses / Louise Penny

The 13th novel in Penny’s Inspector Gamache mystery series sees our hero taking big risks to fight the opioid crisis in Quebec. He and his team focus on catching the big crime boss smuggling drugs across the border from Vermont, endangering his beloved town of Three Pines in the process. 

45. The Bone Houses / Emily Lloyd-Jones

My Halloween read for the year, this dark fairytale of a YA novel was perfect for the season. Since her parents died, Ryn has taken over the family business - grave digging - to support herself and her siblings. As the gravedigger, she knows better than most that due to an old curse, the dead in the forest surrounding her village don’t always stay dead. But as more of the forest dead start appearing (and acting more violently than usual), Ryn and an unexpected companion (yes, a charming young man cause there’s got to be a romance!) travel to the heart of the forest to put a stop to the curse once and for all.

46. The Witches Are Coming / Lindy West

Another blazing hot set of essays from my favourite funny feminist take on Trump, abortion rights, #MeToo, and more importantly Adam Sandler and Dateline. As always, Lindy, please be my best friend?

47. Know My Name / Chanel Miller

This memoir is HEAVY but so, so needed. Recently, Chanel Miller decided to come forward publicly and share that she was the victim of Brock Turner’s sexual assault. She got the courage to do so after she posted her blistering and beautiful victim impact statement on social media and it went viral. Miller’s memoir is a must-read, highlighting the incredible and awful lengths victims have to go to to see any modicum of justice brought against their attackers. Miller dealt with professional ineptitude from police and legal professionals, victim-blaming, victim-shaming, depression and anxiety, the inability to hold down a job, and still managed to come out the other side of this trial intact. And in the midst of all the horror, she writes beautifully about her support system - her family, boyfriend and friends - and about the millions of strangers around the world who saw themselves in her experience.

48. Christmas Ghost Stories: A Collection of Winter Tales / Mark Onspaugh

Ghosts AND Christmas? Yes please! This quirky collection features a wide array of festively spooky tales. You want the ghost of Anne Boleyn trapped in a Christmas ornament? You got it! What about the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future drinking together in a bar? Yup, that’s here too! 

__

So, what were my top picks of the year, the books that stuck with me the most? In no particular order:

Educated

Homegoing

The Wanderers

Know My Name

Scarborough

[suchagiantnerd]

54 Books, 1 Year

2018 was my first full year back at work after my mat leave, and thanks to all the time I spend on the subway, my yearly reading total is back up to over 50 books!

2018 was a dark year, and I made a conscious effort to read more books from authors on the margins of society. The more those of us with privilege take the time to listen to and learn from these voices, the better we’ll be as friends, colleagues and citizens.

You’ll also notice a lot of books about witchcraft and witches in this year’s list. What can I say? Dark times call for resorting to ANYTHING that can help dig us out of our current reality, including putting a hex on Donald Trump.

Trigger Warning: Some of the books reviewed below are about mental illness, suicide, domestic violence, sexual assault, and violence against people of colour, Indigenous people and people in the LGBTQ community.

Here are this year’s mini reviews:

1.       The Lottery and Other Stories / Shirley Jackson

Jackson’s short stories were published in the late forties and fifties, but their slow-burning creep factor holds up today. The stories involve normal people doing normal things until something small gives, and we realize something is really wrong here. As you read through the collection, take note of the mysterious man in blue. He appears in about half of the stories, always in the margins of the action. Who is he? I read him as a bit of a trickster figure, bringing chaos and mayhem with him wherever he goes. Other people have read him as the devil himself. Let me know what you think!

2.       The Ship / Antonia Honeywell

I was excited to read this YA novel about a giant cruise ship-turned-ark, designed and captained by the protagonist Lalla’s father in a dystopic near future. The premise of the book is great and brings up lots of juicy questions – where is the ship going? How long can the passengers survive together in a confined space? How did Lalla’s father choose who got to board the ship? But the author’s execution was a disappointment and focused far too much on Lalla’s inner turmoil and immaturity.

3.       The Hot One: A Memoir of Friendship, Sex and Murder / Carolyn Murnick

My book club read this true crime memoir detailing the intense, adolescent friendship between Carolyn, the author, and Ashley, who was murdered in her home in her early 20s a few years after the girls’ friendship fizzled. Murnick is understandably destroyed by the murder and obsessed with the killer’s trial. The narrative loops back and forth between the trial and the girls’ paths, which diverged sharply after Ashley moved away in high school. Murnick (the self-proclaimed nerdy one) muses on the intricacies of female friendship, growing up under the microscope of the male gaze, and the last weekend she ever spent with Ashley (the hot one). This is an emotional, detailed account of a woman trying her best to bear witness to her friend’s horrific death and to honour who she was in life.

4.       The Break / Katherena Vermette

Somebody is brutally attacked on a cold winter night in Winnipeg, and Stella, a young Métis woman and tired new mother is the only witness – and even she isn’t sure what she saw. The police investigation into the attack puts a series of events in motion that make long-buried emotions bubble to the surface and ripple outwards to touch a number of people in the community, including an Indigenous teenager recently released from a youth detention center, one of the investigating officers (a Métis man walking a fine line between two worlds), and an artist. This is a tough read, especially in the era of #MMIW and #MeToo, but all the more important because of it.

5.       So You Want to Talk About Race / Ijeoma Oluo

Probably the most important book I read this year, I will never stop recommending this read to anyone and everyone. This is your Allyship 101 syllabus right here, folks. Do you really want to do better and be better as an ally? Then you need to read every chapter closely and start implementing the lessons learned right away. This book will teach you about tone policing, microaggressions and privilege, and how all of those things are harmful to people of colour and other marginalized communities.

6.       The Accusation / Bandi

This is a collection of short stories by a North Korean man (written under a pseudonym for his protection as he still lives there). The stories were actually smuggled out of the country for publication by a family friend. The characters in these stories are regular people living regular lives (as much as that is possible in North Korea). What really comes across is the fine line between laughter and tears while living under the scrutiny of a dangerous regime. There are several scenes where people laugh uncontrollably because they can’t cry, and where people start to cry because they can’t laugh. This book offers a rare perspective into a hidden world.

7.       Being Jazz: My Life as a (Transgender) Teen / Jazz Jennings

Some of you will be familiar with Jazz via the TLC show about her and her family, “I Am Jazz”. I’d never seen it but was inspired to read the book to gain a better understanding about what coming out as trans as a child is like. Jazz came out to her family at 5 years old (!) and her parents and siblings have had her back from the beginning. If you are still having a tough time understanding that trans women are women, full stop, this book will help get you there.

8.       A Field Guide to Getting Lost / Rebecca Solnit

When it comes to the books that gave me “all the feels”, this one tops the 2018 list. Solnit is everything - historian, writer, philosopher, culture lover, explorer. Her mind is always making connections and as you follow her through her labyrinthine thoughts you start to feel connected too. Her words on loss, nostalgia and missing a person/place/time actually made me cry, they were so true. For me, an agnostic leaning towards atheism, she illuminated the magic in the everyday that made me feel more spiritually rooted to life than I have in a long time.

9.       I Found You / Lisa Jewell

Lots of weird and bad things seem to happen in British seaside towns, don’t they? This is another psychological thriller, à la “The Girl on the Train” and “Gone Girl”. One woman finds a man sitting on the beach one morning. He has no idea who he is or how he got there. Miles away, another woman wakes up one morning to find her husband has vanished. Is the mystery man on the beach the missing husband? Dive into this page-turner and find out!

10.   The Midnight Sun / Cecilia Ekbäck

This novel is the sequel to a historical Swedish noir book I read a few years ago. Though it’s not so much a sequel, as it is a novel taking place in the same setting – Blackasen Mountain in Lapland. This story actually takes place about a hundred years after the first novel does, so it can be read on its own. Ekbäck’s stories dive into the effect of place on people – whether it’s the isolation of a harsh and long winter or the mental havoc caused by the midnight sun on sleep patterns, the people on Blackasen Mountain are always strained and ready to explode. (Oh, and there’s also a bit of the supernatural happening on this mountain too – but just a bit!)

11.   After the Bloom / Leslie Shimotakahara

Strained mother-daughter relationships. The PTSD caused by immigration and then being detained in camps in your new home. Fraught romances. Shimotakahara’s novel tackles all of this and more. Taking place in two times – 1980s Toronto and a WWII Japanese internment camp in the California desert – this story of loss, hardship, betrayal and family is both tragic and hopeful.

12.   Company Town / Madeline Ashby

In this Canadian dystopian tale, thousands of people live in little cities built on the oil rigs off the coast of Newfoundland. Hwa works as a bodyguard for the family that owns the rigs and is simultaneously trying to protect the family’s youngest child from threats, find out who is killing her sex-worker friends, mourn her brother (who died in a rig explosion), and work through her own self-esteem issues. Phew! If it sounds like too much, it is. I really did like this book, but I think it needed tighter editing and focus.

13.   The Power / Naomi Alderman

In the near-future, women and girls all over the world develop the ability to send electrical shocks out of their hands. With this newfound power, society’s gender power imbalance starts to flip. The U.S. military scrambles to try and work this to their advantage. A new religious movement starts to grow. And Tunde, a Nigerian photographer (and a dude!) travels the world, trying to document it all. This is an exciting novel that seriously asks, “what if?” in which many of the key characters cross paths.

14.   Milk and Honey / Rupi Kaur

Everyone’s reading it, so I had to too! Kaur’s poems are refreshing and healing, and definitely accessible. This is poetry for the people, for women, for daughters, mothers and sisters. These are poems about how women make themselves small and quiet, about our inner anger, about sacrifice, longing and love.

15.   Tell It to the Trees / Anita Rau Badami

In the dead of winter in small-town B.C., the body of big-city writer Anu is found outside of the Dharmas’ house, frozen to death. Anu had been renting their renovated shed, working on a novel in seclusion. As we get to know the Dharmas – angry and controlling Vikram, his quiet and frightened wife Suman, the two children, and the ghost of Vikram’s first wife, Helen, we feel more and more uneasy. Was Anu’s death just a tragic accident, or something else entirely? There is a touch of “The Good Son” in this novel…

16.   You Are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life / Jen Sincero

This book was huge last year and my curiosity got the better of me. But I can’t, I just can’t subscribe to this advice! All of this stuff about manifesting whatever you want reeks of privilege and is just “The Secret” repackaged for millennials and Gen-Z. Thank u, next!

17.   All the Things We Never Knew: Chasing the Chaos of Mental Illness / Sheila Hamilton

Shortly after a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, Hamilton’s husband, David, took his own life after years of little signs and indicators that something wasn’t right. Her memoir, in the aftermath of his death, is a reckoning, a tribute, and a warning to others. In it, she details the fairy tale beginning of their relationship (but even then, there were signs), the birth of their only child, and the rocky path that led to his final choice. Hamilton’s story doesn’t feel exploitative to me. It’s an important piece in the global conversation about mental health and includes lots of facts and statistics too.

18.   This Is How It Always Is / Laurie Frankel

This is a beautiful novel about loving your family members for who they are and about the tough choices parents have to make when it comes to protecting their children. Rosie and Penn have five boys (that this modern couple has five children is the most unbelievable part of the plot, frankly), but at five years old, their youngest, Claude, tells the family that he is a girl. Claude changes her name to Poppy, and Rosie and Penn decide to move the whole family to more inclusive Seattle to give Poppy a fresh start in life. Of course, the move has consequences on the other four children as well, and we follow everybody’s ups and downs over the years as they adjust and adapt to their new reality.

19.   Dumplin’ / Julie Murphy

While I didn’t love the writing or any of the characters, I do need to acknowledge the importance of this YA novel in showing a fat teenager as happy and confident in who she is. Willowdean Dickson has a job, a best friend and a passion for Dolly Parton. She also catches the attention of cute new kid, Bo, and a sweet summer romance develops between the two (with all of the miscommunications and misunderstandings you’d expect in a YA plot). This is an important book in the #RepresentationMatters movement, and is now a Netflix film if you want to skip the read!

20.   Kintu / Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi

This was touted as “the great Ugandan novel” and it did not disappoint! The first part of the novel takes place in 1754, as Kintu Kidda, leader of a clan, travels to the capital of Buganda (modern day Kampala) with his entourage to pledge allegiance to the new Kabaka. During the journey, tragedy strikes, unleashing a curse on Kintu’s descendants. The rest of the novel follows five modern-day Ugandans who are descended from Kintu’s bloodline and find themselves invited to a massive family reunion. As their paths cross and family histories unfold, will the curse be broken?

21.   The Child Finder / Rene Denfeld

I bought this at the airport as a quick and thrilling travel read, and that’s exactly what it was. Naomi is a private investigator with a knack for finding missing and kidnapped children. This is because she was once a kidnapped child herself. The plot moves back and forth in time between Naomi’s current case and her own escape and recovery. There was nothing exceptional about this book, but it’s definitely a page-turner.

22.   Difficult Women / Roxane Gay

Are the women in Gay’s short stories actually difficult? Or has a sexist, racist world made things difficult for them? I think you know what my answer is. The stories are at times beautiful - like the fairy tale about a woman made of glass, and at times violent and visceral – like a number of stories about hunting and butchering. Women are everything and more.

23.   My Education / Susan Choi

I suggested this novel to my book club and I will always regret it. This was my least favourite read of the year. I thought it was going to be about a sexy and inappropriate threesome or love triangle between a student, her professor, and his wife. Instead it had a few very unsexy sex scenes and hundreds and hundreds of pages about the minutiae of academic life. I can’t see anyone enjoying this book except English professors and grad students.

24.   Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities / Rebecca Solnit

This series of essays was a balm to my soul after Ford won the provincial election. It reminded me that history is full of steps forward and steps back, and though things look bleak right now, there are millions of us around the world trying to make positive changes in big and little ways as we speak.

25.   The Woman in Cabin 10 / Ruth Ware

Another novel in the vein of “The Woman on the Train”, that is, a book featuring a young, female, unreliable narrator. Lo knows what she saw – or does she? There was a woman in the now empty Cabin 10 – or was there? And also, Lo hasn’t been eating or sleeping. But she’s been drinking a lot and not taking her medication. I’m kind of done with this genre – anyone else?

26.   My Brilliant Friend / Elena Ferrante

After hearing many intelligent women praise this novel (the first in a four-part series), my book club decided to give it a try. I didn’t fall in love with it, but I was sufficiently intrigued by the intense and passionate friendship between Lila and Lenu, two young girls growing up in post-war Naples, that I will likely read the whole series. Many claim that no writer has managed to capture the intricacy of female friendship the way that Ferrante has.

27.   The Turquoise Table: Finding Community and Connection in Your Own Front Yard / Kristin Schell

This is Schell’s non-fiction account of how she started Austin’s turquoise table movement (which has now spread further into other communities). Schell was feeling disconnected from her immediate community, so she painted an old picnic table a bright turquoise, moved it into her front yard, and started sitting out there some mornings, evenings and weekends - sometimes alone, and sometimes with her family. Neighbours started to gather for chats, snacks, card games, and more. People got to know each other on a deeper level and friendships bloomed. This book is a nice reminder that small actions matter. A small warning though – Schell is an evangelical Christian, and I didn’t know this before diving in. There is a focus on Christianity in the book, and though it’s not quite preachy, it’s very in-your-face.

28.   Sing, Unburied, Sing / Jesmyn Ward

This was hands-down my favourite novel of the year. It’s a lingering and haunting look at the generational trauma carried by the descendants of those who were enslaved and lived during the Jim Crow era. One part road trip novel, one part ghost story, the plot follows a fractured, multi-racial family as they head into the broken heart of Mississippi to pick up the protagonist’s father, who has just been released from prison.

29.   Full Disclosure / Beverley McLachlin

This is the first novel by Canada’s former Chief Justice, Beverley McLachlin. As someone who works in the legal industry and has heard her speak, I couldn’t wait to get my hands on this. But, with all due respect to one of the queens, the book was very ‘meh’. The plot was a little over the top, the characters weren’t sufficiently fleshed out, and I felt that the backdrop of the Robert Pickton murders was somewhat exploitative and not done respectfully. Am I being more critical of this novel than I might otherwise be because the author is so intelligent? Likely yes, so you can take this review with a grain of salt.

30.   The Long Way Home / Louise Penny

This is the 10th novel in Penny’s Inspector Gamache mystery series. As ever, I fell in love with her descriptions of Quebec’s beauty, the small town of Three Pines, and the delicious food the characters are always eating. Penny’s books are the definition of cozy.

31.   In the Skin of a Lion / Michael Ondaatje

Ondaatje has the gift of writing novels that read like poetry, and this story is no exception. Taking place in Toronto during construction of the Don Valley bridge and the RC Harris water treatment plant, the plot follows a construction worker, a young nun, an explosives expert, a business magnate and an actress as they maneuver making a life for themselves in the big city and changing ideas about class and gender.

32.   The Story of a New Name / Elena Ferrante

This is the second novel in Ferrante’s four-part series about the complicated life-long friendship between Lila and Lenu. In this installment, the women navigate first love, marriage, post-secondary education, first jobs and new motherhood.

33.   The Happiness Project / Gretchen Rubin

In this memoir / self-help book, Rubin studies the concept of happiness and implements a new action or practice each month of the year that is designed to increase her happiness levels. Examples include practicing gratitude, going to bed earlier, making time for fun and learning something new. Her journey inspired me to make a few tweaks to my life during a difficult time, and I do think they’ve made me more appreciative of what I have (which I think is a form of happiness?)

34.   The Virgin Suicides / Jeffrey Eugenides

I loved the film adaptation of this novel when I was a teenager, but I’d never actually read it until my book club selected it. Eugenides paints a glimmering, ethereal portrait of the five teenaged Lisbon sisters living a suffocating half-life at the hands of their overly protective and religious parents. The story is told through the eyes of the neighbourhood boys who longed for them from a distance and learned about who they were through snatched telephone calls, passed notes and one tragic suburban basement party.

35.   Time’s Convert / Deborah Harkness

This is a supernatural fantasy novel that takes place in the same universe of witches, vampires and daemons as Harkness’ All Souls trilogy. The plot follows the romance between centuries-old vampire Marcus, who came of age during the American Civil War, and human Phoebe, who begins her own transformation into a vampire so that she and Marcus can be together forever.

36.   The Saturday Night Ghost Club / Craig Davidson

Were you a fan of the TV show “Are You Afraid of the Dark?” If yes, this novel is for you. Davidson explores the blurred line between real-life tragedy and ghost story over the course of one summer in 1980s Niagara Falls. A coming-of-age novel that’s somehow sweet, funny and sad all at once, this story delves into the aftershocks of trauma and the way we heal the cracks in families.

37.   Oh Crap! Potty Training: Everything Modern Parents Need to Know to Do It Once and Do It Right / Jamie Glowacki

I hoped this was the book for us, but I don’t think it was. Some of the tips were great, but others really didn’t work for us. The other issue is that the technique in this book is much better suited to kids staying at home with a caregiver, not kids in daycare.

38.   The Witch Doesn’t Burn in This One / Amanda Lovelace

This is a collection of poetry about women’s anger, women’s long memories and strength in sisterhood. It’s accessible, emotional and a bit of a feminist rallying cry. As someone who is obsessed with the Salem witch trials, I also loved the historical backdrop to the poems.

39.   The Rules of Magic / Alice Hoffman

I love to read seasonally, and this prequel to “Practical Magic” was a perfect October book. Remember Jet and Franny, the old, quirky aunts from the movie? This novel describes their upbringing, along with that of their brother Vincent, as the three siblings discover their powers and try to out-maneuver the Owens family curse.

40.   Witch: Unleased. Untamed. Unapologetic. / Lisa Lister

This book has a very sleek, appealing cover. Holding it made me feel magical. Reading it really disappointed me. From Lister’s almost outright transphobia to her unedited, repetitive style, this was a huge disappointment and I don’t recommend it.

41.   The Death of Mrs. Westaway / Ruth Ware

I liked this novel a lot more than Ware’s other novel, “The Woman in Cabin 10”. Crumbling English manor homes, long-buried family evils and people trapped together by snowstorms are my jam.

42.   Weirdo / Cathi Unsworth

Another British seaside town, another grisly murder. Jumping back and forth between a modern-day private investigation and the parental panic around cults and Satanism in the 1980s, Unsworth unpacks the darkness lurking within a small community and the way society’s outcasts are often used as scapegoats. The creep factor grows as the story unfolds.

43.   Mabon: Rituals, Recipes and Lore for the Autumn Equinox / Diana Rajchel

And so begins my witchy education. I have to admit, I really liked learning about the historical pagan celebrations and superstitions surrounding harvest time. I also liked reading about spells and incantations… ooooOOOOoooo!

44.   From Here to Eternity: Travelling the World to Find the Good Death / Caitlin Doughty

In North America, we are so removed from death that we are unequipped to process it when someone close to us dies. But this doesn’t have to be the case. In this non-fiction account, Doughty, a mortician based in L.A., travels the world learning about the business of death, the cultural customs around mortality, and the rituals of care and compassion for the deceased in ten different places. It seems that the closer we are to death, the less we’ll fear it, and the better-equipped we’ll be to process loss and grief in healthy ways.

45.   Samhain: Rituals, Recipes and Lore for Halloween / Diana Rajchel

Did you know that Samhain is actually pronounced “Sow-en”? I didn’t until I read this book, and felt very intelligent indeed, when later, while watching “The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” on Netflix, the head witch pronounced the word as “Sam-hain”, destroying the writers’ credibility in one instant. I am a witch now.

46.   See What I Have Done / Sarah Schmidt

This novel is a retelling of the Lizzie Borden murders, illuminated through four characters – Lizzie herself, the Borden’s maid Bridget, Lizzie’s sister, and a mysterious man hired the day before the murders by Lizzie’s uncle to intimidate Mr. Borden (one of the murder victims). I knew very little about the murders before reading this book, but this version of the tale strongly suggests that Lizzie really is the murderer. Unhinged, childlike, selfish and manipulative, I hated her so much and felt awful for everyone that had to live in her orbit.

47.   The Nature of the Beast / Louise Penny

In the 11th installment of Penny’s Inspector Gamache mystery series, she sets the story up with a parallel to the boy who cried wolf and introduces us to her first killer without a soul. Crimes of passion and greed abound in Penny’s universe, but a crime of pure, cold evil? This is a first.

48.   How Are You Going to Save Yourself? / J.M. Holmes

This is a powerful collection of short stories about what it’s like to be a Black man in America right now. It’s about Black male friendship, fathers and sons, outright racism and dealing with a lifetime of microaggressions. Holmes makes some risky and bold decisions with his characters, even playing into some of the harmful stereotypes about Black men while subverting some of the others. This book really stayed with me. One disturbing story in particular I kept turning around and around in my mind for days afterward.

49.   Split Tooth / Tanya Tagaq

This is a beautiful story about a young Inuit girl growing up in Nunavut in the 1970s, combining gritty anecdotes about bullying, friendship, family and addiction with Inuit myth, legend, and the magic of the Arctic. The most evocative and otherworldly scenes in the novel took place under the Northern Lights and left me kind of mesmerized.

50.   Motherhood / Sheila Heti

Heti’s book is a work of fiction styled as a memoir, during which the protagonist, nearing her 40s, weighs the pros and cons of having a baby. I’ve maybe never felt so “seen” by an author before. I agonized over the decision about whether to have a baby for years before finally making a decision. The unsatisfying, but freeing conclusion that both the author and I came to is that for many of us there is no right choice (but no wrong choice either).

51.   The Mistletoe Murder and Other Stories / P.D. James

This is a short collection of James’ four “Christmas-y” mysteries published over the course of a number of years. It was a perfect cozy read to welcome the holiday season.

52.   The Christmas Sisters / Sarah Morgan

Morgan’s story is a Hallmark holiday movie in book form. A family experiencing emotional turmoil at Christmas? Check. Predictable romances, old and new? Check. A beautiful, festive setting? Check. (In this case, it’s a rustic inn nestled in the Scottish Highlands). This novel is fluff, but the most delightful kind.

53.   Jonny Appleseed / Joshua Whitehead

Jonny is a Two-Spirit Ojibway-Cree person who leaves the reservation in his early 20s to escape his community’s homophobia and make it in the city. Making ends meet as a cybersex worker, the action begins when he has to scrape together enough cash to make it home to the “rez” (and all the loose ends he left behind there) for a funeral. The emotional heart of the novel are Jonny’s relationships with his kokum (grandmother) and his best friend / part-time lover Tias.

54.   Yule: Rituals, Recipes and Lore for the Winter Solstice / Susan Pesznecker

Do you folks believe that I’m a witch now? I am, okay? I even spoke an incantation to Old Mother Winter while staring into the flame of a candle after reading this book.

55.   Half Spent Was the Night: A Witches’ Yuletide / Ami McKay

Old-timey witches? At Christmas time? At an elaborate New Year’s Eve masked ball? Be still my heart. This novella was just what I wanted to read in those lost days between Christmas and New Year’s. You’ll appreciate it even more if you’ve already read Ami McKay’s previous novel “The Witches of New York”, as it features the same characters.

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[suchagiantnerd]

34 Books, 1 Year

2017 marked my first full year as a parent, and it’s taken its toll on how much I can read. My new normal is about 30 books per year. I CAN DEAL.

What stood out this year? For some reason, I read 5 books about cults / communes / nascent belief systems. Is this a sub-genre of fiction I wasn’t all that aware of before? Does it have a name? If not, it should.

Other feelings and themes that repeatedly permeated my reading year were loneliness, and the terribleness of both white people and of groupthink. That’s all really fitting for 2017.

And with that, here are this year’s mini-reviews:

1.       The Night Stages / Jane Urquhart

I feel like Jane Urquhart is the queen of the barren Canadian landscape, but in this beautiful novel, she also transports us to the barren Irish landscape. Following four interconnected individuals (Canadian painter Kenneth Lochhead, Tam, an independent Englishwoman at a crossroads, and Irish brothers Niall and Kieran, who couldn’t be more different), the story shines a light on the deepest parts of our inner lives, longings, and regrets.

2.       And Then There Were None / Agatha Christie

This is the first Agatha Christie novel I’d ever read, and it will probably be the last. No disrespect to the queen of mystery’s talent, but her writing is at times racist and no one’s got time for that in 2017. That said, the novel IS a wild and fun ride, so if you want something similar (and not racist), I highly recommend the novel Ten, by Gretchen McNeil, which is a modern YA retelling of Christie’s original.

3.       The Girl with All the Gifts / M.R. Carey

Speaking of YA (a favourite segway phrase of mine), this one was fantastic. Carey takes the zombie genre to the next level by focusing on second-generation zombies – the children of adults who became zombies while pregnant. These poor kids still desperately crave human flesh but their intelligence and emotions are still intact. The endearing and starved-for-love Melanie, one of the next-gen zombies, is the book’s memorable protagonist.

4.       The Bear and The Nightingale / Katherine Arden

This is the magical winter novel you’ve been waiting for. Grab a blanket, light a candle, and tuck into this dark fairytale-inspired story of Vasya, a child who can see the house, garden and forest spirits that others can’t. Though some are benevolent, others mean harm, and Vasya must protect her remote community with the help of Morozko – Russia’s version of Jack Frost.

5.       Annabel / Kathleen Winter

A beautiful story set in beautiful, barren Labrador in the 1960s. A baby is born with both male and female genitalia. The parents decide to raise the baby as a boy, Wayne. But the midwife who delivered the baby, and is the only other person to know the truth, keeps a secret other name for Wayne: Annabel. As Wayne/Annabel grows up, they start to question who they are and where they belong. This novel is a timely and thoughtful reflection on the confines of gender and small, remote community life.

6.       Suite Française / Irène Némirovsky

With this suite (get it???) of novellas about everyday life during the lead-up to and occupation of France during WWII, Némirovsky manages to capture the ridiculousness and mundanity of war, an angle often ignored by history. One chapter is told from the viewpoint of a cat hunting in a garden at night while bombs fall on the other side of the city. Another describes the women of a French village ogling and daydreaming about the young German soldiers occupying their town, men they want desperately to hate, simply because they haven’t seen any young men in months. Be warned, there are tragic episodes too (all the more so because Némirovsky herself was killed at a concentration camp before the war ended), but she has beautifully captured how even at the worst of times, everyday life manages to roll on.

7.       Ru / Kim Thúy

Thúy’s non-fiction account of her family fleeing to Canada as part of the wave of Vietnamese Boat People in the late 70s reads like poetry, song, diary entry and stream of consciousness. We move back and forth in time from her own early childhood in Vietnam, to a refugee camp, to the arduous journey by boat, to her family’s arrival in Quebec, to her reflections on motherhood as she becomes a parent herself. The heavy topic is well-balanced by the author’s ethereal writing style.

8.       White Tears / Hari Kunzru

I didn’t realize this novel had been classified under ‘horror’ until long after I’d read it, but I think it makes sense. The story follows three white millennials who love black music and culture, but who have also profited dearly from cultural appropriation and due to their privilege, don’t see the problem with it. As they travel deeper and deeper into America’s underbelly in search of rarer and more obscure black music, their misdeeds (and those of their forefathers) begin to haunt them. This is a visceral and moving examination of the ways white people steal, abuse and consume black lives and black art combined with an actual ghost story / murder mystery. It’s horror on two levels.

9.       The Visionist / Rachel Urquhart

This was the first of the cultish novels I read this year. This one introduces us to a mother, daughter and son on the lam who find shelter within a Shaker community in 1840s Massachusetts. Who were the Shakers? I didn’t know either. They were a small Christian sect who were very excitable during worship (dances, songs, rituals) but lived a simple and celibate life outside of that. For teen-aged Polly, the transition from the ‘real-world’ to the Shaker community is filled with confusing ups and downs, compounded by the fact that she starts having religious visions soon after her arrival. I liked learning about this community, but found the plot itself quite clunky.

10.   Do Not Say We Have Nothing / Madeleine Thien

A critically-acclaimed award winner, I really wanted to love this book, but I didn’t. I love sprawling family histories, and Thien definitely delivers in that department – the characters were so human, so vulnerable. But the political movements of China’s recent history drive most of the action and they were beyond my comprehension, so I felt I was reading with a blind spot. The main characters are also all musicians, and there are a lot of passages about composition and theory which went over my head despite having played the violin for years.

11.   The Changeroom / Karen Connelly

This novel was my book club’s juiciest read of the year. Middle-aged Eliza doesn’t just look like she has everything she wants; she does have everything she wants – the adoring husband, two sweet kids, a career she loves. But she falls prey to a mid-life crisis like so many before her, and begins a sexy, obsessive affair with Char, a magnetic woman she meets in a public pool changeroom. Soon, Eliza realizes that she wants all of it – including her husband and Char – and the fallout from this realization is complicated. This is a fun and well-written read that surprisingly captures the ways even the happiest of us can feel trapped under the weight of our everyday responsibilities.

12.   One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter / Scaachi Koul

My favourite genre of non-fiction is humorous, self-deprecating, feminist essays on life, and Koul’s observations do not disappoint. Her anecdotes cover everything from growing up as a brown kid in Alberta, to surviving the countless rituals of a traditional Indian wedding, to campus friendships, to love and to shopping for clothes while female. You could call her Canada’s Mindy Kaling, but we should probably just call her Scaachi Koul, a smart and hilarious woman in her own right.

13.   The Last Neanderthal / Claire Cameron

I think this was my favourite read of 2017. I’m recommending it to anyone who asks what they should read next. Though a work of fiction, Cameron’s obviously done SO MUCH research on the Neanderthals – their culture, artifacts, and the latest findings that suggest they were extremely intelligent and perfectly-adapted to their environment. The story features two parallel plots - what we can assume is one of the last families of Neanderthals on the cusp of their extinction as they encounter Homo Sapiens for the first time and a present-day archaeologist unearthing the bones of one of the Neanderthals. It’s a beautiful, lonely read about being human and craving connection.

14.   I Hear She’s a Real Bitch / Jen Agg

Toronto restauranteur and Twitter phenom Jen Agg takes a big swing at sexism in the restaurant industry in her memoir. That alone makes for a great read, but she also writes about her youth in Scarborough, her passion and talent for food, drink, business, design and creating comfortable and stylish atmospheres, and her love for her artist husband, Roland.

15.   American War / Omar El Akkad

In a not-so-distant future, America is in the throes of a second civil war, and El Akkad paints a searing portrait of a terrorist-to-be. How does Sarat, a curious, intelligent tomboy from rural Louisiana become the future’s equivalent of a suicide bomber? Loss, displacement, violence, and more loss. Isn’t that always the recipe?

16.   The Hate U Give / Angie Thomas

16-year-old Starr lives in two different worlds - her low-income housing development and her upper-class private school. When she witnesses her childhood friend Khalid get shot and killed by a police officer, Starr’s worlds collide as she is thrust into the media spotlight. This timely story is told so sensitively and should probably be added to all high school curricula.

17.   Mr. Splitfoot / Samantha Hunt

The second of the cultish novels I read this year, this story jumps back and forth in time between Ruth and Nat, teenage orphans about to age out of their overly religious foster home, and adult Ruth as she accompanies her niece on an odyssey-like walking trip across upstate New York for a mysterious purpose. A modern American Gothic, Hunt’s world is populated by religious zealots, neglected children, charming salesmen and flat-out creeps. Amidst all this, she also crafts a beautiful story about everlasting love and friendship.

18.   Wine. All The Time. / Marissa Ross

Would you like to learn more about wine from a writer who makes it fun, informal, and not so intimidating? This is the book for you. I’ve already tried some good varietals I never knew existed.

19.   Arcadia / Lauren Groff

The third of the cultish novels I read, this one details the rise and fall of Arcadia, a commune of hippies (also in upstate New York) through the eyes of Bit, its youngest member. We witness the enthusiasm and optimism of Arcadia’s heyday and the slow dropping-away of its members as they lose faith in their leader, Handy. This is a well-written book full of sympathetic characters, but is quite predictable in its narrative arc. There are no surprises.

20.   Parable of The Sower / Octavia Butler

This is an important piece of literature in the dystopian canon as it’s written by a Black woman and features a Black, female protagonist. It’s also the fourth of the cultish books I read, as the main character develops her own system of beliefs called “Earthseed” and starts preaching them to fellow travellers she meets on the road after her gated community is destroyed. I loved the diversity of characters in this book, and Butler’s dystopian future is more likely than versions from other authors, but I found the plot stagnant at times, and found it hard to believe that Lauren would gain so many followers so quickly.

21.   Parable of The Talents / Octavia Butler

This is the sequel to Parable of the Sower and follows Lauren and her new community as Earthseed gains momentum.

22.   The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden History of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade / Ann Fessler

Wow. This one packs an emotional wallop. Fessler, an adoptee herself, was inspired to interview countless women who were made to surrender their babies for adoption, despite the fact that none of them wanted to. I have to admit, I was very naïve about the history of adoption. I’d always assumed that most women who gave their children away were ultimately okay with the decision. This was not the case at all. These women never healed, always wondered, and felt so unbearably alone afterwards. Keep the Kleenex handy.

23.   Autumn Loiterers / Charles Hanson Towne

I randomly ordered this chapbook of poetry online because I liked the title. I had no idea it was written in 1917 or who the poet was and was wary when I delved in, but it is the most charming little read! Towne’s poems and musings detail a roadtrip he took with his friend through the Berkshires at the peak of autumn and it’s as quaint and comforting as you could hope for.

24. �� The Witches of New York / Ami McKay

This was my second-favourite read of the year. Witches? Check. Old-timey New York? Check. Feminism? Check. A touch of Egyptology? Check. McKay writes beautifully and reading this book during the Halloween season was a genuine pleasure. In it, someone is hunting the witches of New York, and a group of three very different witchy women must come together to stop the murders. This book will make you feel all the feels you felt while watching The Craft for the first time at a friend’s sleepover.

25.   The Graveyard Book / Neil Gaiman

This book for older children is both terrifyingly dark and incredibly sweet, they way novels for children should be. Like Dickens, Dahl and Rowling giving us Oliver, Matilda and Harry, Gaiman gives us Bod (short for Nobody). Bod’s family is murdered while he is still a toddler. Before the killer can find him too, he manages to toddle to a nearby graveyard and is protected and raised by the local ghosts. This is a bittersweet read about growing up and finding yourself against all odds.

26.   Nocturnal Animals / Austin Wright

I still haven’t seen the movie that was based on this novel and after reading the novel, I probably never will. I think I would find it too disturbing. This is a thriller and it’s also a book about reading and writing, and specifically about the relationship between author and reader. The plot begins when Susan receives a manuscript of a novel from her ex-husband of many years, Edward. When they were married, Edward had always wanted to be a writer but had never managed to write anything. Susan begins reading, and can’t help but wonder what parts of Edward and herself are represented in his characters.

27.   The Witches: Salem, 1692 / Stacy Schiff

Schiff’s non-fiction account of the Salem Witch Trials is verrryyyy detailed. I have always been fascinated and horrified by the trials, so I devoured this book, but I still had to skim a lot of the political and religious passages and couldn’t quite keep track of all the players. The two things that really stood out for me are that nothing ever occurs within a vacuum (and my god, the various and contradictory motivations of the accusers, accused, judges, clergy and politicians are a veritable web) and that loneliness, boredom and dread can really jumpstart the imagination.

28.   Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City / Tanya Talaga

All Canadians should read this book. It chronicles the deaths of seven Indigenous teenagers in Thunder Bay, all of whom had left their remote communities to go to high school in the city. It exposes the neglect and racism of the Thunder Bay Police Force and our government. It highlights the heavy emotional toll that losing these young people is taking on their communities. And it explores, once more, the terrible legacy of the residential school system.

29.   The Vegetarian / Han Kang

What is going on in the South Korean zeitgeist? This novel, coupled with Bong Joon-ho’s Okja (which I admittedly haven’t yet seen, I’m too scared to watch it), seems to suggest South Korea is doing some soul-searching about society’s relationship to animals and nature. In Kang’s story, an average homemaker decides to stop eating meat after she has a disturbing dream. Her husband is unnerved and her family in disbelief, but she keeps at it and simultaneously retreats further and further into herself. Her decision starts to affect others around her in interesting and surprising ways. The story is both beautiful and blunt, leaving lots up in the air for debate.

30.   How the Light Gets In / Louise Penny

Another of Penny’s Inspector Gamache mysteries, this one is loosely inspired by the lives of the Dionne Quintuplets.

31.   Foxlowe / Eleanor Wasserberg

The last of the cultish novels I read, this story follows the lives of a small group of people who refer to themselves as The Family, living in an old mansion in the British countryside. They are led by the enigmatic and zealous Freya, whose belief in the healing power of the Standing Stones near the house is all-encompassing. As some of the other members of The Family start quietly questioning this, Freya’s fanaticism grows. This crushing novel is told from the viewpoint of one of The Family’s children, Green, as she navigates childhood and teenager-hood in this too small, isolated community.

32.   Little Theatres / Erin Moure

I love Erin Moure’s more recent poetry, so I decided to give her earlier work a try. I enjoyed reading this chapbook, but felt this work was too beyond me. Guys, I didn’t get it. I just didn’t.

33.   The Marrow Thieves / Cherie Dimaline

Fans of YA Dystopia, you need to read this book. It’s Canadian and it’s written by an Indigenous author, featuring a cast of Indigenous characters. In the not-so-distant future, humanity (except for Indigenous populations) has lost the ability to dream, and a dreamless life slowly leads to insanity. The Canadian government has resorted to harvesting the bone marrow of Indigenous people, as the marrow is where the dreams live. The book follows a group of Indigenous people on the run through the northern woods of Ontario as they try to find a safe place to rebuild / mount a defense. Based on the ending, my guess is that this will eventually be a series.

34.   Sapiens / Yoval Noah Harari

I’m only two-thirds done this book, but I’ve been reading it forever and am including it in the list for 2017. Harari’s book is marketed as “a brief history of humankind”. It’s kind of that, but more of a brief history of three different revolutions in human history, which have led us to where we are today: the cognitive revolution, the agricultural revolution, and the scientific revolution. We went from being hunter-gatherers, to masters of agriculture, to a scientific / imperialist / capitalist society. I’m learning a lot, but Harari also has a tendency to beat his points into the ground. This book could probably be much shorter than it is. His disdain for humanity also really comes through.

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[suchagiantnerd]

46 Books, 1 Year

In 2016 I didn’t QUITE make it to my goal of reading 50 books, but I sh*t out an adorable human instead so I don’t feel too bad. Because of the pregnancy and baby-having, I also decided to cut myself some slack and didn’t take notes after finishing each book (which I usually do), so this year’s reviews are not as detailed as usual. But if you’re interested in learning more about any of these reads, just message me and I can chat more about them!

1. The Year of Living Danishly: Uncovering the Secrets of the World’s Happiest Country / Helen Russell I am obsessed with the Danish concept of hygge (which loosely translates to ‘coziness’). I wanted to learn more about how to live a life full of hygge and other ways of increasing happiness. This is a fitting read for this time of year. January doesn’t have to be cold and depressing; it can be full of candlelight, soft blankets, comforting food, and friends and family. The message seems to be to nestle in and hibernate together!

2. Dragonfly in Amber / Diana Gabaldon The second book in the Outlander series follows Claire and Jamie as the battle of Culloden approaches. Can they stop it? Or does attempting to change history result in even worse outcomes?

3. Voyager / Diana Gabaldon I can’t say much about the third book in the Outlander series, as it will spoil some big plot twists. So I’ll just say that the sex scenes are as great as ever!

4. Six Metres of Pavement / Farzana Doctor Set in Toronto, this story follows three broken people as they slowly find community and acceptance with each other - Ismail grieves his infant daughter years after her death (which was ultimately his fault), Celia, recently widowed, deals with loneliness and feeling unwanted, and Fatima, a queer university student, deals with the fallout of coming out to her traditional family. A heartwarming read, though the plot feels a bit too contrived.

5. The Light Between Oceans / M.L. Stedman You best read this one before the movie comes out! Or is it already out and I’m that out of touch now? This story will make you want to visit all the barren, lonely lighthouses you can find. It will also make you thank god for your relatively uncomplicated life. This book is heartbreaking and features baby-stealing (with the best of intentions), WWI PTSD, and a look at life (for better or worse) in small town Australia.

6. Cinder / Marissa Meyer You thought for a second I’d forgone my first love, YA Dystopian? Nuh uh! This is the first in a series that works fairytale characters into a futuristic world full of spaceships, robots, and a violent lunar people. “Cinder” obviously pays homage to Cinderella. But instead of one glass slipper, she’s got one bionic leg and is an expert mechanic.

7. Circling the Sun / Paula McLain Based on the real-life love triangle between Beryl Markham, Karen Blixen and Denys Finch Hatton in while colonial Kenya, McLain takes us from Beryl’s “wild” childhood without a mother figure playing with her Kipsigis (a Kenyan tribe) best friend and riding horses, to her bold and sometimes disastrous adult years training horses, falling in and out of love and lust, and eventually becoming one of the first women to fly solo across the Atlantic. This is a well-written and dreamy story, but ignores most of the world outside the expat community. Is that irresponsible? I don’t know.

8. Wolf Winter / Cecilia Ekback If there’s a better “dead of winter” read, I don’t know what it is. I loved this tale taking place in 1717 in Swedish Lapland. A disparate group of settlers struggles to survive a particularly brutal winter just after one of their members turns up dead. Was it actually an animal attack? Many of the settlers believe otherwise as suspicion and cabin fever set in.

9. Behind the Beautiful Forevers / Katherine Boo This non-fiction account of a Mumbai slum reads like a novel. Journalist Katherine Boo spent months getting to know the slum’s residents, gaining insight into their hopes and dreams, the drudgery of their day-to-day existence, and the political and personal ties between them all. Their stories will break your heart.

10. Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom Is Wrong - and What You Really Need to Know / Emily Oster I’ve always dreaded pregnancy, mainly because of all the policing of pregnant women’s bodies. This book is a nice antidote to all of that. When Oster, a statistician, became pregnant for the first time, she gathered together all of the valid studies about caffeine and alcohol consumption, gardening, certain foods, owning cats, etc, etc, etc and and complied their results, determining what’s really harmful to a growing baby and what’s not. Have your cup of coffee in the morning, ladies. And a glass of wine now and then is just fine! But no ciggies. No ciggies at all.

11. The Heart Goes Last / Margaret Atwood Atwood’s latest novel does not disappoint. Set in a near-dystopian future, a new gated community takes the prison-as-business model one step further. Rotating every month, half of the population acts as prisoners in an actual prison, while the other half maintain the town or work as prison guards. It’s efficient, right? Less housing required, the prisoners all do work to help the town, everyone gets a salary. But it just might be too good to be true…

12. Drums of Autumn / Diana Gabaldon Once again, I can’t say much about the fourth book in the Outlander series for fear of spoilers except that Jamie and Claire are a bit older now, and there’s a new generation of sexy Scottish people to populate your daydreams.

13. Fifteen Dogs / Andre Alexis I don’t know what to say about this book other than I both loved it and hated it? This is also the book my book club has spent the most time ever talking about. Set in Toronto, it follows 15 dogs staying the night at a veterinary clinic who are suddenly blessed/cursed with human consciousness. What follows is occasionally comedic, but mostly violent and terribly sad.

14. I Just Want to Pee Alone / Some Kick Ass Mom Bloggers I should probably have waited to read this collection of true stories until after I’d had the baby. In one story, a woman describes her post-birth vagina as a sad old elephant.

15. The Damned / Andrew Pyper Pyper is great at sketching out a truly creepy character. In this story, Dan is haunted by his deceased twin sister, who happened to be a sociopath while alive. Now that she’s dead, her ability to torture him seems to have no bounds. I also really liked the book’s setting of Detroit.

16. Scarlet / Marissa Meyer The second book in the “Lunar Chronicles” series, this book focuses on a Red Riding Hood-inspired protagonist. And the love interest is pretty wolf-like. Oooh mama!

17. The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century / Steven Pinker Full disclosure: This is a grammar book. Basically you shouldn’t read this unless you write for a living / want to really improve your writing. I’m not even sure I should have read it. Some tips were great, others were too detailed for me to grasp, others I already forget.

18. Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time / Jeff Speck Though this book focuses on American cities, it applies to anywhere. If you’re an amateur urban planning nerd like me, you’ll love this book. Two fun factoids - trees increase a neighbourhood’s value and liveability A LOT and you’re more likely to suffer a heart attack in the few hours after you’ve been driving a car. Driving in a city is THAT stressful.

19. How to Be a Woman / Caitlin Moran In this non-fiction tome of memories / essays, well-known British feminist Moran takes on body image, sex, working in the music industry, pregnancy and childbirth, living in poverty, and abortion.

20. The Jade Peony / Wayson Choy This novel reads more like a series of related short stories, and follows the childhoods and teenage years of three siblings, Jook-Liang, Jung-Sum and Sek-Lung living in Vancouver’s Chinatown in the 1930s and 40s. This is a touching book, and each child deals with their own stresses and troubles from losing a beloved grandmother to realizing one’s sexuality to the difficulties of life as a child of new immigrants.

21. Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman / Lindy West Lindy West is my hero, and the author of my favourite piece of comedic writing ever, a hilarious review of Jurassic Park from beginning to end. She’s also a fiercely intelligent feminist and this is her first book. It’s about trying to make herself as small and quiet as possible, only to realize that that’s bullshit. As women, we should be as big and loud as we want.

22. I Was Told There’d Be Cake / Sloane Crosley This is a non-fiction collection of stories from Crosley’s life. Who is she? I didn’t know before and I still don’t really know, but she’s a Jewish New Yorker who is a good writer and is pretty funny. This collection is not heavy in the least - it’s just some funny and amusing anecdotes from a regular person’s life.

23. Tampa / Alissa Nutting Hooooooooo boy. What can I say about this one? Nutting tells the story of Celeste Price, a 26-year old middle school teacher who is a pedophile. And Price is relentless in her pursuit of the perfect victims, searching for boys just on the cusp of puberty. This is kind of a reverse “Lolita”. But I gather it’s way grittier (I have not read “Lolita” so I can’t say for sure). Nutting is a good writer and her style is very, shall we say, visceral? But this book is not for everyone.

24. The Widow / Fiona Barton This book felt like Barton’s attempt to get on the “Gone Girl” / “The Girl on the Train” bandwagon, and it fell short. I don’t recommend it. I also hated the main character, a simpering weakling of a woman.

25. Time Zero / Carolyn Cohagan This feels like a “The Giver” of our time. It’s also a truly feminist YA dystopian novel. In it, Cohagan has created a world (in what used to be Manhattan) run by men with a set of very harsh rules for women. In a poignant twist, all of the rules in the novel are actual rules that various women around the world today have to live under. I really believe this book should be added to the public school curriculum.

26. Battle Royale / Koushun Tatami Before “The Hunger Games”, there was “Battle Royale”. Set in a dystopian Japan, each year in a government experiment, random classes of ninth graders are sent to secluded locations and forced to kill each other until one survivor remains. To prevent runaways, each student must also wear a collar which explodes if the student tries to escape. YIKES. A cult classic, this is a sad and violent read full of interesting characters.

27. Before the Fall / Noah Hawley A private plane crashes into the Atlantic ocean, and of the 11 people on board, only two survive - a young boy and the lone outsider, an aspiring artist who’d recently befriended one of the rich passengers. This is a tight, scintillating thriller, and as the mystery of what (or who) caused the crash unfolds, we get an inside look at each of the passenger’s thoughts and backgrounds. I didn’t love the resolution, but the excellent lead-up was worth the read.

28. The Passage / Justin Cronin I reread this for the third time in advance of the release of “The City of Mirrors” (book 30), the third in this trilogy. This remains my favourite book / series of all time. It’s a dystopian/sci-fi/thriller/epic full of an amazing cast of characters and spanning over a century.

29. The Twelve / Justin Cronin I also reread the second book in “The Passage” trilogy.

30. The City of Mirrors / Justin Cronin As expected, the final book in this trilogy both thrilled me and broke my heart.

31. The Haunting of Maddy Clare / Simone St. James I just wanted a good old-fashioned book about a ghost set in the British countryside. This book was that, but was cheesier than I thought it would be. And unexpectedly involved a sexy romance sub-plot which was enjoyable and terrible at the same time.

32. The Girls / Emma Cline In the summer of 1969, bored and naive teenager Evie befriends a mysterious older girl named Suzanne, who slowly brings her into the folds of a Manson-inspired cult. The Manson-y cult leader isn’t quite as big a character as you might think, and the book, like the title, really does focus on the relationships between young girls that we can all relate to - the idolization, the obsessiveness, the jealously, the fervent love we sometimes feel for each other.

33. The Last Star / Rick Yancey I had to read the final book in “The Fifth Wave” alien trilogy, and much like the “Divergent” series, this series gets worse with each tome.

34. The Bluest Eye / Toni Morrison Penola is a young Black girl growing up in Ohio in the post-Great Depression era. Her life is shit. Daughter to an abusive father and an overtired and busy working mother, teased at school, and simply put, already beaten down by life, all Pecola wants are for her eyes to turn blue. This is a classic and an important read for these times.

35. Indian Horse / Richard Wagamese This novel tells the story of Saul, an Ojibway boy sent to a residential school after his family spends a few years trying to protect him from just such a fate. Saul’s only escape from the horrors of the school is his growing love of hockey. It turns out that he’s a gifted player, and his talent allows him a chance at a better life. All Canadians should read this book. The racism Saul experiences in the 1970s is still alive and well today all across this country.

36. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child / J.K. Rowling, John Tiffany, Jack Thorne If you’re a Potter fan, you’ve also already read this, and if you’re not, you don’t care!

37. After Birth / Elisa Albert I read this novel in preparation for motherhood. In it, we meet Ari, a first-time mother dealing with feelings of loneliness and the emotional fallout of her caesarian section. She cannot get over it, and her anger and sadness are palpable. She later befriends mother-to-be Mina, and the two develop their own little support system (or should I call it a lifeline?). This is a much needed story about pregnancy, birth, mothering, female friendship, and the importance of support from friends, family, and the medical profession.

38. Sex Object: A Memoir / Jessica Valenti In this collection of anecdotes from feminist and journalist Valenti, she tackles issues of sexism, harassment, internet trolling and your everyday, run-of-the-mill misogyny against the backdrop of her youth and young adulthood in New York. Add this to your growing feminist library (we all have one, right?)

39. Parenting Beyond Pink and Blue: How to Raise Your Kids Free of Gender Stereotypes / Christia Spears Brown, PhD The title says it all. But as you’ve probably seen, Fern wears a lot of pink. You can’t say no to hand-me-downs and gifts! I guess I’ll work to combat gender stereotypes in other ways…

40. Middlesex / Jeffrey Eugenides This is a sprawling coming-of-age story about Cal, who is intersex. When born, Cal appeared to be a girl and was raised as such. As they go through puberty, Cal’s transformation is more confusing and painful than that of most, and they start to question their identity. Eugenides also details the strange and somewhat taboo history of Cal’s family, illustrating that nothing occurs in a vacuum. We exist in the context of our families. This was a thoughtful and engaging read.

41. Everything I Never Told You / Celeste Ng This novel explores all the things we don’t tell those we are closest to - our spouses, our children, our parents, our siblings - and the fallout of these omissions. It also explores the unique challenges of a mixed-race family living in 1970s America including overt and subtle racism, feelings of not belonging, and questioning one’s own identity. On top of all this, Ng has also rolled in a gripping mystery.

42. The Japanese Lover / Isabel Allende Allende is one of my favourite authors, but this book fell flat. The dialogue felt forced and preachy, and the characters, especially the Japanese ones, were often stereotypes. A tale of illicit love and Japanese internment camps (sounds promising, right?) I would skip this one, especially if you’ve never read Allende before.

43. North American Lake Monsters / Nathan Ballingrud I was so excited to read this collection of strange and scary short stories, but it was a disappointment. Ballingrud does not take any of these stories far enough, and the endings were almost all vague and left things up in the air. I don’t consider this tactic all that artistic anymore, it just seems lazy. COMMIT TO AN ENDING, authors, COMMIT TO A DANG ENDING!

44. Cold Mountain / Charles Frazier Towards the end of the Civil War, soldier Inman has had enough. Recovering from a serious neck wound in hospital, he decides to defect and make his way home to Cold Mountain and his love, Ada. Meanwhile, back on Cold Mountain, Ada’s fallen on hard times and is in serious survival mode. As Inman makes his long way home, Frazier paints a broken and bloody countryside on the cusp of something new.

45. Mrs. Poe / Lynn Cullen This is a juicy historical fiction novel about the love triangle between Edgar Allan Poe, his wife, and his contemporary, writer Frances Osgood. Surprisingly, the delicate ingenue Mrs. Poe seems like the creepiest one of the three (whether or not this is based on fact, I don’t know). I loved the setting, the plot, and the literati cast of characters, but the style of writing was a bit fluffy. It felt as though Cullen was writing with a future movie deal in mind.

46. All My Puny Sorrows / Miriam Toews Set in Winnipeg and Toronto, this story follows a Mennonite family plagued by tragedy after tragedy. Toews explores issues of intergenerational trauma, suicide, mental health, the damaging effects of patriarchy, and how amidst all that, love still flourishes.

[suchagiantnerd]

56 Books, 1 Year

56 BOOKS, 1 YEAR

I managed to get through 56 books in 2015. As always, there were winners and losers. Below are my mini-reviews!

1. The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie / Alan Bradley

It’s 1950 in the British countryside and 11-year old Flavia, a child genius in chemistry, decides to solve the mystery behind the death of a strange man in her family’s garden. I tend to like mysteries, but I found Flavia pretentious, arrogant and too detached for my liking.

For: Those who like a quaint British read or who enjoy precocious child characters.

2. Bad Feminist / Roxane Gay

I loved this easy-to-read collection of essays on gender, race, and the intersection between the two. Gay dissects all kinds of pop culture franchises including Twilight, The Help, Django Unchained, as well as news stories from the past few years. She also suggests that people who are afraid of Feminism with a capital “F” should develop their own brands of feminism, allowing for inconsistencies and mistakes.

For: Everyone. We need to open our eyes up to new view points and become more adept at consuming culture critically.

3. Practical Jean / Trevor Cole

Jean is a middle-aged, dreamy, sensitive pottery-maker living a normal, humdrum life in small-town Canada with her dopey, inefficient husband and a close group of girlfriends drawn from the most common clichés imaginable. At the beginning of the novel, Jean has just lost her mother to the ravages of cancer and has been traumatized by this. She decides that the kindest thing she can do for those she loves most, in order to save them from the horrors of aging and disease, is to give them each one last moment of happiness and then quickly kill them. I tend to like dark comedies, but this was too ‘cute’ for me.

For: People who liked the TV show Pushing Daisies or those who want a dark take on the ‘group of girlfriends bonding’ story.

4. The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America / Thomas King

This non-fiction account provides readers with a run-down of Indigenous / white relations in Canada and the U.S. since white people arrived, and the many, terrible ways those past relations (and countless injustices) inform our present. King presents the facts sparsely, using a touch of humour here and there, which actually works well. He zeroes in on the harmful idea of “the savage” versus civilization, that the Indigenous communities were waiting for civilization as whites understood it. This belief is still rampant today, and damages all of us through a variety of systems including capitalism and christianity.

For: Every Canadian and American citizen. This is a history we have a duty to educate ourselves about.

5. Beyond Belief / Josh Hamilton and Tim Keown

Hamilton details his transition from a no-nonsense prodigy baseball player to a serious drug addict and back again. This is a nice story of redemption and forgiveness, but oh my god is it corny! Hamilton is also so into Jesus in a way I can’t relate to. There are a few very literal passages about Jesus, demons and God that I couldn’t help but laugh at. Like, he saw Jesus outlined on a snowy TV screen one night. So.

For: People looking for a joke read, baseball enthusiasts, or those looking to learn more about the addict’s frame of mind.

6. The Weight of Blood / Laura McHugh

McHugh masterfully crafts a double-mystery in the Ozarks (hillbilly country!) 17-year old Lucy’s friend turns up dead after being missing for one year, and Lucy (spurned on partly by her own mother’s disappearance 16 years prior) tries to find out what happened. The two mysteries unfurl in parallel, and what results is a frightening story about the bonds / shackles of family, small-town secrets, and questioning whether we know the people we love as much as we think we do.

For: Mystery lovers, people who are curious about “hillbilly culture” (is that a thing?)

7. The Year of Magical Thinking / Joan Didion

Didion’s memoir reflects on her grief in the year following her husband’s sudden death and her daughter’s serious medical ordeal. The writing is sparse and sometimes technical, but truthful - she really lays bare her feelings for the reader. Didion absolutely nails the internal thoughts of the griever - the looking back, the “what were we doing one year ago?” thoughts, the inability of the mind to ever fully wrap around the finality of the life/death divide, the guilt over wallowing while being incapable of anything else.

For: People going through grief. You’ll feel slightly less alone.

8. Americanah / Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

This is a sprawling, enthralling read, and one of the best novels I’ve read in a long time. The story follows Ifemelu and Obinze, two Nigerian teens who fall in love and have dreams of going abroad together. But when circumstances change, Ifemelu goes to America alone and this experience tears the two apart. Adichie follows her characters as they navigate culture shock, racism and meeting new people, and stays with them as they adjust and settle into their lives abroad. This is a beautiful story about love, race, religion, and how where you are from informs so much about who you are while also highlighting how adaptable humans can be, and how easily we can slip into new lives.

For: People who love big, sweeping stories or those interested in learning about life in Nigeria.

9. Labor Day / Joyce Maynard

It’s Labor Day weekend in small-town America, and 13-year old Henry and his agoraphobic mother Adele are out for a rare trip to Pricemart when Henry is approached by Frank, a man in trouble asking for assistance. Adele and Henry agree to help, and soon learn that Frank is an escaped convict. Over the course of this hot, hot weekend, Adele and Frank fall in love and the three become an odd but sweet family unit. However Henry, on the verge of puberty, is conflicted about keeping Frank’s secret and unaccustomed to sharing his mother’s attentions. This is ultimately a bittersweet tale about wanting to belong somewhere.

For: Fans of Nicholas Sparks’ novels.

10. Station Eleven / Emily St.John Mandel

This dystopian novel is about the end of one civilization (ours) and the start of another. Within weeks, the Georgia Flu wipes out 99% of the world’s population. We, the reader, are in Toronto on the night the outbreak begins. What follows is a fantastic story that flashes backwards (to before the outbreak) and forwards (15-20 years after the outbreak), following many interconnected characters as they die or survive and adjust. This beautiful novel is about friendship, love, memory, art, celebrity, religion, hope vs. despair, and the things that last when civilization as we know it dies.

For: Dystopian fans, people who love novels with deep, complex characters.

11. The Leftovers / Tom Perrotta

Perrotta’s novel takes place three years after a rapture-like event has occurred, during which a small percentage of the world’s population vanished in an instant. Since then, new cults have sprouted up and are gaining traction, while previously religious people have lost their faith. The action focuses on the Garvey family - Mom, Dad, adult son, teenage daughter. Though none of them vanished, their lives changed irrevocably. Kevin, the father, has become the town’s mayor, trying to keep things together, while Laurie, the mother, has left the family to join a cult. The son joins a different cult but is quickly losing faith, while the daughter is going down a troubled, angry path. This story raises questions about the definition of a good person and how you go on after something like this occurs.

For: Those looking for a twist on the traditional family drama.

12. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking / Susan Cain

I had to read the bible for introverts and the extroverts who love or work with them! Cain provides great insights on both personality types, looking at introversion and extroversion as two ends of a spectrum, and examining the introvert in many contexts: work, school, and love/family/friendship. The key takeaway is that one third to one half of people are introverts, but in the Western world we live in a society that values extroversion, meaning introverts are at a disadvantage. She also details the strengths that introverts can offer, which should be encouraged and appreciated in our society.

For: All introverts, and the extroverts who love, manage, or collaborate with them.

13. Last Night at the Viper Room: River Phoenix and the Hollywood He Left Behind / Gavin Edwards

Edwards presents us with a detailed and sympathetic account of River Phoenix’s life - his parents, birth, unconventional childhood (his family was part of a cult that became increasingly predatory towards children), his foray into acting, his personal beliefs, and his teenage and young adult years until his death at 23. Interviewees and sources repeatedly described Phoenix as an angel who felt too deeply, and that had he lived, he would have been one of the greatest actors of his generation. The book made me feel really nostalgic, painting a detailed picture of late 80s / early 90s Hollywood.

For: Hollywood buffs, anyone nostalgic for the 80s or 90s.

14. Never Have I Ever: My Life (So Far) Without a Date / Katie Heaney

Heaney’s memoir is a hilarious comfort to quiet, awkward, nervous girls like me. Written at 25, Heaney provides a funny and heartfelt account of her life loving boys and never managing to date one, from elementary school through to grad school. NOTE: Two years after publication, Heaney has begun dating a woman and has expressed that she never had any inkling she might be queer while writing the book. She hopes her fans continue to be comforted by her story.

For: All the quiet, socially awkward girls!

15. The World Without Us / Alan Weisman

In this non-fiction exercise about an unlikely but possible future, the author wonders, if humanity was suddenly wiped out tomorrow, what would happen to the buildings, the animals, the environment? Weisman predicts that things would slowly revert back to how the world used to be, including the evolution of new, giant mammal species roaming the earth! This is an easily-digestible read for non-scientific minds.

For: Amateur science, geology or zoology nerds.

16. A House in the Sky / Amanda Lindhout and Sara Corbett

Lindhout’s heartwrenching memoir details her childhood in small-town Alberta, her world travels throughout her twenties, and her eventual kidnapping in Somalia. Held for 15 months for a ransom her family can’t pay, Lindhout endures rape, torture, hunger and repeated shaming at the hands of her captors. Yet miraculously, she is still able to find small glimmers of humanity and beauty to hang onto throughout it all.

For: People who like stories about the strength of the human spirit.

17. A Trick of the Light / Louise Penny

Part of the Inspector Gamache series of mystery novels, this instalment begins with the murder of a woman during a BBQ for a newly successful artist in the village of Three Pines. As Gamache and his team unravel the mystery, secrets and bottled feelings of anger and jealousy bubble to the surface of the town.

For: Mystery lovers and art enthusiasts.

18. Sisterland / Curtis Sittenfeld

Twins Daisy and Violet had to navigate a lonely childhood with the added burden (or gift?) of being somewhat psychic or “having senses”, as their family puts it. As they grow older, Violet embraces this side of herself while Daisy tries to minimize, and eventually rid herself of it. During adulthood, after Violet predicts a catastrophic earthquake, the twins grow close again, causing Daisy to re-evalute her life, kids, husband, friendships, and gift. This was a great read offering an insightful look at family dynamics and the things we say and don’t say to each other.

For: Those looking for a suspenseful family drama, with a slight supernatural twist.

19. The Beautiful Mystery / Louise Penny

This is another instalment in the Inspector Gamache series of mysteries. Gamache and his second-in-command are brought to a famous, reclusive monastery in the wilderness of Northern Quebec after the choirmaster is murdered. The setting is stunning. Penny also delves into issues of PTSD, addiction, and ‘dirty cops’ in this story.

For: Mystery fans.

20. Annihilation / Jeff Vandermeer

This is the first novel in the Southern Reach trilogy. The reader follows a field expedition into Area X - a small part of the U.S. coastline that has been inhabited(?) / corrupted(?) / taken over(?) by an unknown force. The Southern Reach is a government agency tasked with figuring out what is happening and how to stop it. Vandermeer takes us along on the expedition with the four people who make up the expedition team, and it soon becomes apparent that the protagonist (if there can be a protagonist in a novel like this) serves as the team’s biologist. It turns out that the biologist has a personal connection to the mission, and as days go by, finds herself almost enamoured by Area X. As readers, we start to wonder - is that such a bad thing? Is this place actually hostile, or just interpreted that way?

For: Conspiracy and dystopia fans, and the philosophically-inclined.

21. Authority / Jeff Vandermeer

The second book in the Southern Reach trilogy moves the camera back to give the reader a bigger view of the Southern Reach agency. The action occurs in the Southern Reach headquarters after the expedition in the first book has finished. The main character is Control (a nickname), the new Director of the agency, trying to figure out what the hell is going on politically while learning more and more disturbing facts about Area X and his new colleagues’ agendas.

22. Acceptance / Jeff Vandermeer

The final book in the Southern Reach trilogy bring together the main characters from the first two books, as they try to figure out once and for all what Area X is, and what its ‘intentions’ are (if any). In this instalment, Vandermeer also paints some detailed flashbacks of life in the area before Area X, including the regular people who used to live there. More than the first two books, this tome has a very human side. All in all, this is a beautiful, thoughtful, philosophical sci-fi trilogy.

23. Dark Places / Gillian Flynn

I loved Flynn’s other two novels, and this one did not disappoint. We follow the story of adult Libby Day, who as a 7-year-old lost her mom and two sisters in a satanic-style murder. Her older brother Ben went to jail for the crime, and Libby has never doubted his guilt until she’s approached by an amateur crime role-playing group who claim it doesn’t add up. Libby begins to doubt her memories of that night and reluctantly starts working with the group to figure out what really happened, while dealing with the psychological trauma of dredging everything back up.

For: Fans of Gone Girl or other dark thrillers.

24. The Fever / Megan Abbott

Out of the blue one day, a healthy teenage girl has a seizure in the middle of class and is hospitalized. Soon after, other teenage girls start succumbing to bizarre, scary symptoms and a town is thrown into turmoil as no one can figure out the cause. Theories abound - the HPV vaccine? The town’s polluted lake water? Mold in the high school? Abbott examines the intricacies of female teenage friendship - the intense love and devotion, the jealousy and secrets - as well as how outsiders (parents, teachers, male teenagers) look at those friendships as things to be wary of, and maybe sometimes feared.

For: Women who’ve been teenagers or those who’d like a glimpse into the complex (no sarcasm here) teen female mind.

25. The Three / Sarah Lotz

Other than the wayyyy too ambiguous ending, I loved this modern-day thriller. In the span of just a few hours, four passenger planes crash in four different spots around the world. In all but one of the crashes, there is just one lone child survivor. The bulk of the book’s narrative examines the fallout of these crashes, and is written in the form of a book manuscript by an investigative journalist. It includes excerpts from interviews, news articles, and transcripts of internet chats. After the crash, people close to the child survivors notice they are acting differently. Is it the PTSD, or, as some believe, are they harbingers of the apocalypse?

For: Fans of thrillers and supernatural stories.

26. One True Thing / Anna Quindlen

This story follows 24-year-old Ellen, an ambitious writer who’s just starting a career in New York City when she learns her mother has cancer and will likely die within the year. Ellen’s overbearing father (whom she’s tried to please her whole life) basically demands that she move back home to care for her mother during the illness, as he refuses to do it himself. Ellen obliges, and as her relationship with her father suffers under the strain and obligation, she bonds beautifully with her mom. This is a lovely novel about how children can never really “know” their parents as full people, and is also a study of loss, fear and grief, and human connection.

For: Fans of the movie Step Mom, people dealing with family illness.

27. Frog Music / Emma Donaghue

This novel is based on a true story, but is extremely embellished. Set in 1876 in San Francisco, the narrative jumps back and forth in time over the span of a few weeks. Blanche, a dancer and high-end call-girl, has her life slowly upended by a new friend, Jenny, who was incredibly progressive for the time, refusing to conform to gender norms. When Jenny is murdered, Blanche thinks she knows who did it, and works to bring them to justice while simultaneously getting her life back on track. I loved the premise of this book, but it fell flat. Donaghue’s resolution felt lazy, and there was too much historical detail included that wasn’t pertinent to the plot.

For: People who really like historical fiction.

28. The Boy Kings / Katherine Losse

My Cultural Studies education predisposed me to loving this non-fiction account about the early days at Facebook. Losse (who was an early employee) has thought a lot about virtual reality and our online selves vs. reality and shares some astute observations on the melding of the two. She also provides great insights into the early culture at Facebook (spoiler: it wasn’t a welcoming place for women). Losse also delves into the Silicon Valley hierarchy of makers vs. everyone else. Starting out as a Customer Service rep, she was considered the lowest of the low.

For: People who read The Circle by Dave Eggers, or are planning to see the film version. Eggers has been accused by some of stealing elements of this book to write his novel. Though the endings are very different, there are some similarities too.

29. So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed / Jon Ronson

In this non-fiction book, Ronson interviews a number of people who have been publicly shamed over the past few years - a journalist caught fudging facts, a woman who tweeted something inappropriate, people outed for their odd sexual fantasies, etc., and examines the effects of shame on their lives. Ronson also includes a mini history lesson on public shaming and its role in society over the years, both the good and the bad. He asks if in the internet age, perhaps public shaming is no longer useful? Are we now just a virtual pitchfork mob raging blindly at each other?

For: Cultural Studies nerds, and shamers and shamees alike.

30. The Martian / Andy Weir

Who DIDN’T read The Martian this year? In the near future, NASA has started running successful missions to Mars. During one of these missions, Mark Watney is injured during a storm and assumed dead. His crew abandons him. Hours later, he wakes up alone with no way of contacting Earth to tell them he is alive. The next mission is not scheduled to arrive for four years, and thus begins Watney’s struggle to survive, and eventually thrive on Mars. I was so excited to read this book, but for me, it was disappointing. There were far too many long-winded scientific explanations that can’t be understood by laypeople and I also couldn't relate to Watney’s character at all. I think he cried once or twice for a minute, and the rest of the time he made snide, sarcastic jokes.

For: Science nerds, fans of the ‘bro-nerd’ character combo.

31. Jane Eyre / Charlotte Bronte

Mom, you were right. Mr. Rochester IS incredibly hot! Jane is a smart and thoughtful orphan, unloved by her adoptive family and sent to live at a charity school, from which she eventually graduates and becomes a teacher for. However, wanting to see more of the world, she decides to become a governess to a family elsewhere in England. The child’s guardian is Mr. Rochester - gruff, blunt, but also worldly, smart, and quietly funny. He and Jane take to each other quite quickly. But before the two lovebirds can be together, like any good novel, we need some roadblocks. These include the adorations of a local rich woman, Jane’s pride and self-respect, their class difference, and, oh yes, Mr. Rochester’s first wife (who, by today’s standards, we understand to have a mental illness) living like an animal in the attic. This is a classic gothic romance!

For: Jane Austen fans, those working their way through the classics.

32. Little Bee / Chris Cleave

This is a story about a tragic chance meeting between strangers - Little Bee, a Nigerian teenager fleeing for her life, and Sarah and Andrew, a British couple working out some marriage issues while on holiday in Nigeria. Sarah and Andrew each make an important decision during this chance meeting that alter all three lives forever. Years later, Little Bee has managed to get to London, and as Sarah and Andrew are the only people she knows in England, she looks them up. Confusion and tragedy ensue. Cleave paints us a gritty, unflinching portrait of life for immigrants in Britain, highlighting the heartbreak, the loneliness, and even the boredom. This is a novel about the West’s melting pot culture, privilege, and marriage.

For: Those looking to get a better understanding of the immigrant experience.

33. The Next Species: The Future of Evolution in the Aftermath of Man / Michael Tennesen

In this non-fiction account, Tenneson examines where humans and other species came from, and uses that knowledge to take some guesses as to where we’re headed. Mars? Extinction? A virtual life that continues after our bodies die? I really enjoyed learning about all the changes the earth has been through over time, as well was what North America used to be like. But craziest of all? Tenneson reminds the reader that at one time, there were four species of humans living at once, but eventually homo sapiens won out. It’s entirely possible that there is a new species of human already developing among us and we can’t even tell yet!

For: People who like to ponder life’s big questions. History nerds.

34. Between the World and Me / Ta-Nehisi Coates

In this memoir written in the form of a letter to his 15-year-old son, Coates attempts to explain how to live in a Black, American male body, and about what it means to live in such a body in present-day America. A body still carrying the burdens of slavery, Jim Crow, the Civil Rights movement. The letter is at times a battle cry, at times a scream for recognition, at times a quiet poem. Coates also includes lots of anecdotes from his own life and his own experiences with racism, as well as drawing on facts from the larger historical context. Finally, it deals directly with every parent’s fear (which is more real for parents of Black boys) - how do I let my child out in a world where terrible things happen? And how do I deal with that?

For: Everyone.

35. The Dark Bride / Laura Restrepo

This is a book of haunting passages and languid, loving descriptions of landscapes, towns and people. Restrepo tells the story of the symbiotic relationship between the Tropical Oil Company in the Colombian forest, and Tora, the small city nearby (and specifically the prostitutes of Tora). On a smaller scale, the story is about a love triangle involving Sayonara, a mysterious young girl who becomes the most sought after ‘puta’ in the city, and two men: Sacramento, her childhood friend, and Payanes, Sacramento’s best friend as an adult.

For: Fans of Isabel Allende’s novels or stories involving big character transformations.

36. The Circle / Dave Eggers

Though pretentious (in true Eggers form), this novel was also still very entertaining. In the very near future, recent college grad Mae is recruited at ‘The Circle’ - a fictional company in the style of a Google / Facebook hybrid. Life at The Circle is insular and ‘Circlers’ are expected to participate in as much of the campus life as they can in addition to their demanding jobs. Impressionable Mae finds it hard to fit in at first, but instead of questioning whether the company culture is right for her, she continues to dive straight in and is soon in love with her new lifestyle. It’s pretty clear that in some ways, she’s brainwashed. This book serves as a cautionary tale about our online selves and the growing pressure for more likes, comments, and positive ratings.

For: Millennials and people who like psychological thrillers.

37. Oryx and Crake / Margaret Atwood

Atwood’s first book in a literary dystopian trilogy takes place in the nearish future and jumps back and forth in time between the end of humanity as we know it and shortly after this disastrous engineered disease was loosed on the world. Our main character is Jimmy, an affable, aloof, class-clown who appears to be the only survivor of the disease. It’s through Jimmy’s flashbacks that we learn about his family life, romances, career, and most importantly, his friendship with Crake (an enigmatic, highly intelligent person) and Oryx (the love of both their lives). Atwood’s rendering of the future is scarily possible, involving gene-splicing gone wrong, big pharma running the world, and a ruined environment.

For: Dystopia fans.

38. The Year of the Flood / Margaret Atwood

In this second instalment of Atwood’s trilogy, we follow two women, Toby and Ren. Each of them has also survived the end of humanity by being isolated from the general population while the disease rampaged. Prior to the disaster, both were members of a religious / eco-saviour group called God’s Gardeners, and much of the book’s flashbacks focus on this group and the ways in which they interacted with the outside world. Toby and Ren are strong female leads, which makes sense, because to survive as a woman in Atwood’s future you have to be tough, stoic, careful, and alert to survive.

39. Maddaddam / Margaret Atwood

The last book in Atwood’s trilogy brings together the characters from the first two books, as they form the remnants of human society in the aftermath of the disaster. As they struggle to survive in this new world, Atwood draws our attention to what makes us human, what brings us together, what makes us believe in something greater than ourselves, and what happens to us if those beliefs are proved false. I couldn’t help but fall in love with every character. Each was full of vulnerabilities, rich histories, and emotional scars. I was rooting for them all the way.

40. The Devil You Know / Elisabeth de Mariaffi

This is the story of rookie reporter Evie Jones, who finds herself enthralled in a cold case to which she is personally connected. The novel is both a tense, well-paced “who dun’ it” and an articulate and gritty reflection on female fear - the fear only women understand and are burdened by - the fear of being followed, attacked, raped, killed, taken; the fear of the dark, of sounds in the house, of enclosed spaces, of windows at night; the fear of making men angry, of saying no. To make things creepier, the story is set against the 1993 backdrop of Paul Bernardo’s arrest.

For: Feminists. Men wanting to better understand women’s fear. Mystery lovers.

41. The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry / Gabrielle Zevin

The overarching feeling of this book is coziness. Zevin writes a short, sweet story about A.J. Fikry, a recently widowed bookstore owner on Alice Island. A.J. begins as a sad, grumpy drunk, and through a series of odd, unbelievable and sometimes charming events over the years, he manages to again find a life full of love, passion and pride, built from a community of fellow book-lovers. This is a perfect autumn or winter read, and it made me want a bookstore with creaky wooden floors on an island too!

For: Book lovers.

42. Feed / Mira Grant

This is the first book in a zombie dystopian trilogy with a political conspiracy twist. It takes place 20 years after the ‘zombie uprising’, and society still exists with some degree of normalcy. There are still governments, borders, schools and neighbourhoods, but it’s a world where surveillance and security are key. The story follows sibling bloggers Georgia and Shaun Mason, who’ve gained a certain amount of fame, and have been selected to follow the campaign trail of Senator Ryman as he runs for President. This is a unique and fun take on the zombie genre and the plot was exciting, but I hated the dialogue, and because of that, I couldn’t empathize with any of the characters.

For: Zombie enthusiasts.

43. The Sound of Glass / Karen White

I loved the seaside South Carolina setting of this book, but that was it. The characters were cheesy stereotypes, the dialogue was worse than that of a soap opera, and the plot was ridiculous - the threads connecting the mystery were just too far-fetched. Quick summary: Northerner Merritt is left a house in South Carolina by her deceased husband. She decides to move there and be sad and alone with her secret, but Merritt’s estranged step-mom and half-brother (what?) have other plans, and also move in. Drama ensues.

For: People who don’t mind far-fetched plots and vapid characters.

44. God Loves Haiti / Dimitry Elias Leger

This novel follows three people in the devastating aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake - the President of Haiti, an old man ready to retire; the President’s new wife, Natasha, a young and fervent artist from poor beginnings; and Alain, Natasha’s lover, a young political whippersnapper whose values and wants shift as he lives in and helps support one of the impromptu camps of survivors after the quake. The author explores the ideas of fate, God, religion, how we handle tragedy, and of course, love.

For: People who love character-driven stories, or those interested in learning more about Haiti.

45. The Painted Bridge / Wendy Wallace

It’s 1859 in London, and Anna impulsively marries an older man who is practically a stranger to escape from a depressing home situation. A few weeks later, he commits her to Lake House, a women’s asylum. Sure of her sanity, Anna must piece together why her husband did this and how to get out, slowly making allies for herself both within and outside the walls. Wallace paints a bleak picture of the treatment of women whose behaviour wasn’t wanted - those suffering from depression, not adhering to social norms, expressing too much passion, etc.

For: Fans of psychological thrillers and those interested in medical history.

46. Il pleuvait des oiseaux (in English: And the Birds Rained Down) / Jocelyne Saucier

This is a story about the need for escape - from tragedy, monotony, or confinement. The novel opens with three old men living out their last days in the forests of Northern Ontario, until one, the most mysterious of the three, dies. The other two soon discover that Ted was a secret artist, focusing all his works on one single thing - the forest fires he lived through in his youth. As the men grapple with this discovery, an old woman shows up, also searching for escape, and changes the dynamics of this little community for good. This is a touching reflection on nature, love, mortality, what it means to live a good life, and what happens to those who are forever haunted by the past.

For: Cottage or cabin-goers looking for some thoughtful alone time.

47. Why Not Me? / Mindy Kaling

Kaling’s second book is not quite as funny as her first, but it’s still incredibly enjoyable. In this one, we also catch glimpses of Mindy’s serious side - how hard she works on her show, and how hard she’s always worked on her projects. My favourite part of the book is her impossible and sweet attempt to define just exactly what she and B.J. Novak are to each other. Once again Mindy, be my BFF!

48 and 49. Deadline, Blackout / Mira Grant

The second and third books in the political zombie trilogy were much more of the same thing. There is wayyyyy too much dialogue. These books could be half the size. Don’t read them unless you loved the first book.

50. The Axeman’s Jazz / Ray Celestin

This is a crime thriller based on real-life events - a series of grisly murders by the ‘Axeman’ of New Orleans in 1919, who was painted by the media as an almost supernatural being. Celestin’s take on the crimes weaves together Detective Talbot (a good cop with a secret whose career is failing due to office politics), Luca (a former dirty cop trying to put his past behind him), and Ida (a young woman trying to prove herself as a PI, helped by a young, fictionalized Louis Armstrong!). As they each work their way closer to the killer, Celestin takes us from jazzy, booze-filled speakeasies to the bayou, painting a colourful, musical portrait of the Big Easy at a particular moment in time. The author also explores race, culture, the immigrant experience, superstition, and the human desire for revenge.

For: Mystery lovers, people who can’t get enough of New Orleans.

51. The River Midnight / Lilian Nattel

Nattel’s novel is a detailed, interwoven tapestry of a small Polish village / Jewish community in 1894, on the eve of great historical, political and cultural change. Each chapter focuses on one villager in particular as they grow and change over the course of the year. With the addition of each new character’s viewpoint comes a series of overlapping, interconnecting stories of village life, as well as insight into the villager’s motivations. This is a beautiful, quiet exploration of love, romance, friendship, family, nature, village politics, morality, religion and gender roles.

For: People who like epic stories and character transformations.

52. Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat / Bee Wilson

This non-fiction book details the history of humans and one of our great loves - eating. Wilson looks at how food and the ways we prepare it went from a survival necessity to a luxury as we discovered news ways to cook, bake, and make better tasting food. She also provides a history of our utensils - what’s stood the test of time, what hasn’t, and why not. Lastly, the author accounts for the way culture, class and gender have influenced the evolution of our food, and that added context made this a really interesting read. For example, did you know that the relatively recent invention of the table knife actually changed our physiology? The jaw’s natural overbite is a new development!

For: Foodies and history buffs.

53 and 54. The 5th Wave, The Infinite Sea / Rick Yancey

This is a good, solid YA dystopian trilogy. It’s no Hunger Games, but it’s so much better than almost anything else out there. In the near future, highly-evolved aliens invade earth in five waves designed to kill most of the world’s population. Teenager Cassie has lost both her parents in the waves and been separated from her little brother. She plans to find him at any cost. This is an intriguing take on the alien genre. These aren’t your Independence Day aliens, no siree. The third book comes out later in 2016.

For: YA dystopian fans.

55. The Illegal / Lawrence Hill

The plot of this novel could be ripped from today’s headlines about refugees and immigration, only the featured countries are fictional - the impoverished and tiny Zantoroland, famous only for its marathon runners, and large, wealthy Freedom State, which is cracking down on refugees from Zantoroland. Keita Ali is a marathoner living illegally in Freedom State after fleeing from Zantoroland’s cruel dictatorship. As he tries to find his footing, he meets lots of interesting characters, some of whom try to help him, others who are out to deport him. This is a powerful yet sweet novel, that asks how a person be illegal?

For: Those interested in getting insight into the refugee experience.

56. Gold Fame Citrus / Claire Vaye Watkins

Ex-model Luz and ex-soldier Ray find each other soon after the drought has so ravaged California that most people of means have already evacuated permanently. Only outliers and underground types remain - criminals, conmen, cultish visionaries, religious fanatics. The couple is living as ordinary a life as possible under the circumstances when they encounter Ig, a seemingly neglected toddler. Without much forethought, they take her, thinking they’ll be better caretakers. What follows is their doomed journey to try and build a better life for themselves now that there’s a child in the picture. This is Watkins’ ode to landscape, to the futility of human effort in the face of nature even as we rail continuously against extinction. It’s also an ode to love, however imperfect, angry and desperate.

For: Those looking for a literary dystopian experience. Environment enthusiasts.

And that concludes my reads for 2015! My favourite books of the year were:

Bad Feminist Americanah The Weight of Blood Station Eleven The Boy Kings Jane Eyre The Maddaddam trilogy The Devil You Know Gold Fame Citrus

[suchagiantnerd]

If readers discount certain topics as unworthy of their attention, if readers are going to judge a book by its cover or feel excluded from a certain kind of book because the cover is, say, pink, the failure is with the reader, not the writer. To read narrowly and shallowly is to read from a place of ignorance, and women writers can't fix that ignorance no matter what kind of books we write or how those books are marketed. This is where we should start focusing this conversation: how men (as readers, critics, and editors) can start to bear the responsibility for becoming better, broader readers.

- Roxane Gay, Bad Feminist

[suchagiantnerd]

58 Books, 1 Year

For 2014, I didn’t set myself any kind of goal, and just read. I managed 58 books, and here they are!

1. The Book of Lost Things / John Connolly

Connolly draws on fairy tales and myths to create this charming (and sometimes sinister and creepy) story of 12-year-old David, whose mother has recently passed away. Dealing with this loss, David retreats into the world of books. However, reality and the world of David’s books start to meld, and David soon finds himself stuck in a different land trying to get back home. The “Crooked Man”, a Rumplestiltsken-like character, is truly terrifying, and gave me the shivers.

For: People who love books and people who love fairy tales.

2. Dead North: Canadian Zombie Fiction / compiled by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

This anthology offers a fresh twist on the zombie genre. The settings in these short stories range from the Montreal bio-dome to the streets of Kingston to the Canadian arctic to a British Columbia grow-op. Some take place in the past, some in the present, some in the future. Some of the stories incorporate First Nations myths about the Wendigo. The mood ranges from edge-of-your-seat scary to pensive and sombre. I loved this collection.

For: Zombie-lovers and Canadian lit buffs.

3. A Discovery of Witches / Deborah Harkness

My book club read this and it was perfect for me. Think of it as “Twilight” for adults. The plot follows reluctant witch Diana Bishop, who also happens to be a professor of the history of alchemy. She discovers an old, spell-bound book that witches, vampires and daemons have been searching for for years, drawing much unwanted attention to herself. She aligns herself with Matthew Clairmont, a very old and extremely sexy vampire, to try and discover the book’s origin and purpose. Supernatural sparks start to fly.

For: Fans of supernatural romance.

4. Shadow of Night / Deborah Harkness

The sequel to “A Discovery of Witches”, this instalment sees Diana and Matthew magically travel back in time to Elizabethan England to gain further insight into the spell-bound book. As Harkness is a real-life historian as well as an author, I trusted and was fascinated by her depiction of the time and place. 

5. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest / Stieg Larsson

I finally finished Larsson’s Millenium trilogy, and heroine Lisbeth is still as kick-ass as ever. This book is also filled with other awesome female characters and deals directly with slut-shaming and how society uses women’s sexuality against them. Most importantly, Lisbeth finally gets some justice.

6. Life After Life / Kate Atkinson

This is an amazing story/stories about Ursula Todd, who dies a myriad of ways so many times, and keeps getting another, and another chance at life. Is it a bizarre form of reincarnation? Is it a series of resets or re-dos? Is it God’s will? Is there something she needs to get right? Or is this a series of parallel lives, is Atkinson showing us all the possibilities in one life? It’s an ambitious novel full of questions, and no answers. But the characters are detailed, subtle, complex, and I got attached to them. There’s also an underlying feeling of exhaustion and frustration. Living through death and war again and again. Is it a blessing to have so many chances? Or is it a curse?

For: People interested in life’s big questions and untraditional literary formats.

7. The Pact / Jodi Picoult

Chris and Emily are teenage lovers. They grew up together, their families are best friends, and getting together just made sense. But Emily decides to commit suicide, and convinced this is truly what she wants, Chris agrees to help her. Picoult’s novel deals with the fall-out. Though Chris’ heartbreak, guilt and loneliness made me emotional, overall the plot was unbelievable to me. I didn’t buy it.

For: Drama lovers and fans of sensational stories.

8. A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship and Survival in World War Two / Caroline Moorehead

This is a non-fiction account of female French resisters to the German occupation of France during WWII. They resisted by writing, publishing, and distributing anti-German literature, by speaking out, or by helping Jewish people across the border. For these acts, they were arrested and sent to working or death camps. The book cuts to your core. The horror of the camps, and the disgusting way humans can treat other humans, is disturbing and sobering. But in spite of all the horror, bravery, love and selflessness remain. And that’s a story that needs to be told.

For: History buffs or those who crave inspirational stories.

9. 419 / Will Ferguson

Ferguson’s story starts with a 419 email scam. You know the one - “Dear Sir, I am a Nigerian Prince, please help…” But what happens when somebody takes the bait? This novel ties together three different stories: The Curtis family in Calgary; Winston, the Nigerian email scam artist who dreams of bigger things; Nnamdi and Amina, an unlikely couple from two different Nigerian cultures. The threads come together eventually due to loss, greed, grief, hope and revenge, and the results are devastating. The ending is a stab to the old heart.

For: Suspense lovers and people who love learning about different cultures.

10. Surfacing / Margaret Atwood

Four friendly acquaintances travel to the female narrator’s (who remains nameless) childhood home, a cabin on an otherwise deserted island in Quebec, in order to try and determine if her missing father is dead, or has gone crazy and is living alone in the woods. Taking place in the 1970s, this story looks at changing gender roles (and the subsequent pushback from men, even those who claim to be liberal), feelings of isolation and conflict, the city vs. the country, America vs. Canada and anglophones vs. francophones. Overall, this is a Canadiana-infused mystery that turns into a serious psychological thriller, making us question our connection to nature and memory.

For: Canadian lit nerds and those interested in the dark side of the ‘self’.

11. The Chocolate War / Robert Cormier

This is apparently a YA classic, but I’d never heard of it until my book club read it. The plot follows Jerry, a freshman at a Catholic all-boys school in the early 1970s. Cormier paints a physically and emotionally violent all-male world for us, full of bullying, intimidation, and power dynamics. When Jerry questions, and then begins to rebel against the system, things don’t go so well for him. Generally, I love a private school / secret society story, but I found this book ridiculous. The events that lead to the violent conclusion weren’t serious enough for me to believe the resulting escalation was possible.

For: People who like coming-of-age novels and rebel stories.

12. The Last King of Scotland / Giles Foden

I read this novel in preparation for our trip to Uganda this summer. Based on actual events and people, it’s the fictionalized story of Nicholas Garrigan, a young Scottish doctor working in Uganda during Idi Amin’s rise to power. Garrigan is eventually appointed as Amin’s personal physician, giving him a front row seat to Amin’s charisma and charm, as well as his brutality and delusions. The doctor neither helps nor hinders the situation, but observes with both fascination and horror. He is neither hero nor villain, but represents the majority of people in terrible situations - the bystander. This is a well-written and detailed story about a particular place and time. I really enjoyed it.

For: History buffs and those interested in learning about the inner workings of dictators.

13. The Returned / Jason Mott

I read this novel because the TV show “Resurrection” is based on the book, and I really wanted to get an idea about where this show was going. Sort of spoiler? I got NO answers and was really frustrated. It’s a quick, supernatural read, but I don’t think it’s a good book. There is no character development and I didn’t like the dialogue. The “resolution” is ambiguous and vague, and I feel it’s an irresponsible copout on Mott’s part. I just wanted the author to take a stand. Quick plot summary: Around the world, people start coming back from the dead, just as they were before they’d died. None of them can remember anything about their time “away” from the living. The living then divide into two camps - those who think this is a miracle, and those who are scared and want the returned killed.

For: People who enjoy apocalyptic tales.

14. NW / Zadie Smith

Smith provides us with a gritty, unflinching look at urban, multi-cultural London. The plot follows four people in their 30s living in North West London, who all grew up on the same council estate. The novel looks at their childhoods, and where they’ve ended up as adults. The book brings up questions of race, class, gender, crime, poverty, addiction, family and ancestry. Smith’s dialogue is fantastic. She writes the way people speak, and you really get a feel for the NW London dialect and vocabulary. For me, the big question in the novel is nature vs. nurture. Who or what helps you succeed (or not)? Hard work? Being blessed with intelligence and / or ambition? Your background? Support (or lack thereof) from parents and friends? Luck? As you might expect, there are no easy answers.

For: People who like complex characters and thinking about the tough questions.

15. The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair that Changed America / Erik Larson

This is a non-fiction, historical account of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, told through two parallel stories: the story of Burnham, the businessman and architect who dreamed up the fair; and the story of H.H. Holmes, America’s first known serial killer, who used the fair’s commercial success to draw and lure more victims to his corner of Chicago. Larsen really gives you a feel for the time and for a society on the verge of change. The fair showcased new technology, previously unknown international cultures, and allowed women to be involved in some of the planning. On a more internal level, Larson explores ambition vs. reality, greed, pride, hope, and the amazing and terrible things that can be accomplished given the right circumstances.

For: History buffs and people who enjoy carnivalesque stories.

16. Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns) / Mindy Kaling

Mindy is my twin soul. Let’s just get that out there. And I know I’m not the only lady who feels this way. Her hilarious account of her awkward high school days, her late romantic blooming, her love of comedy and her inappropriateness is so relatable. Mindy, please just be my best friend!

For: Fans of “The Office”, “The Mindy Project” and comedy-lovers.

17. The House of Mirth / Edith Wharton

One of the few literary classics on my list this year, Wharton’s tale of Lily Bart, a 29-year-old high society woman living in turn of the century NYC did not disappoint. Lily gets by on the generosity of friends. She is beautiful, well-bred, charming, the life of any party, and therefore very popular. But, in her teens, her father lost her family’s money. Since then, she has been trying to marry rich. Lily has almost succeeded at this multiple times, but at the last minute chooses not to go through with these loveless marriages. It’s clear to us that her heart is just not in it, even though she craves luxury to a fault, as it’s all she’s ever known. Wharton examines morals vs. desire, money vs. breeding, material comforts vs. emotional comforts, and the role of rich women in society - taught to adorn, charm, and host - useless skills if you’re suddenly cast out of society…FORESHADOWING.

For: Fans of the classics and those who enjoy “fall from grace” tales.

18. Uglies / Scott Westerfeld

In the near future, people live in smaller, environmentally sustainable, population-controlled cities. To curb jealousy and inequality, on their 16th birthday, every citizen gets plastic surgery to become a “pretty”. Before 16, you’re considered an “ugly”. 15-year-old Tally can’t wait for her pretty surgery, but her new friend Shay has other ideas. Shay wants to stay herself and remain an ugly. She plans to run away to a rumoured place called The Smoke, where no one gets the operation. As Tally gets closer to Shay and learns more about life in The Smoke, she starts to discover that maybe becoming pretty is not all it’s cracked up to be…the surgery seems to affect your brain as well as your looks. This is no #HungerGames, but Uglies presents an interesting concept to think about.

For: Fans of the YA dystopia genre.

19, 20, 21. Pretties, Specials, Extras / Scott Westerfeld

There are four books in the “Uglies” series, so I read the other three. I’ll leave it at that to prevent spoilers, but in these three books you definitely learn more about how this new society came to be.

22. Funny Boy / Shyam Selvadurai

This is a touching story about Arjie, a young boy growing up in turbulent 1970s / 80s Sri Lanka. Arjie is Tamil during a time when the Tamil are being discriminated against. Throughout all this, Arjie also comes to realize that he is gay, living in a homophobic culture and family. As he gets older, Arjie loses his innocence, learning what it will mean to be a gay, Tamil man. There are difficult moments in the story, especially when the cultural violence comes to a boil at the end of the book. But there are also sweet moments, mostly stemming from Arjie himself. He is a lovely, tender, kind protagonist. Selvadurai provides an eye-opening snapshot of a time and place while exploring discrimination, fear, and what it’s like to be “othered”.

For: Those who like learning about other cultures and people who like complex characters and family dramas.

23. Love Water Memory / Jennie Shortridge

A woman wakes up in San Francisco Bay with no idea who she is or how she got there. From the resulting news coverage of this case, her fiancé Grady recognizes her (she’s been missing nine days) and comes to get her. As Lucie and Grady try to reconnect and help Lucie’s memories return, we learn Lucie had a very different personality before her disappearance. As she struggles to get back to herself, she (and we) also uncover traumatic family secrets from the past that must be dealt with. I’ll be honest, I really didn’t like this book. The dialogue was terrible, the descriptions were over the top, and I felt like the author was trying too hard. 

For: People who like low-budget made for TV movies. That’s it?

24. Ripper / Isabel Allende

This is a gripping, fantastic novel. The characters are phenomenal - so fleshed out, loveable, quirky and flawed. You want to know them in real life and you really care what happens to them. The story unfolds in present-day San Francisco while a series of murders are occurring. While Bob Martin, a policeman, investigates officially, so do his teen daughter Amanda and his father-in-law Blake, unofficially, with the help of a ragtag collection of nerdy online friends from around the world. As both investigations get closer to the truth, Amanda’s mother / Bob’s ex-wife goes missing. Is she the next victim? This is a suspenseful, beautifully-written and plotted mystery which also focusses on the importance of family, love and friends.

For: Mystery lovers and readers who want to be invested in a book’s characters.

25. Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children / Ransom Riggs

Riggs gives us a YA magical-realism tale about 16-year-old Jacob living in present-day America. Jacob’s grandfather, a survivor of the holocaust, says what saved his life was being sent away to a British children’s home during WWII. But, according to him, it was a home for “peculiar” children - children with magical powers and abilities. After Jacob’s grandfather dies of mysterious and violent causes, Jacob starts to wonder if perhaps some of his grandfather’s tall tales are true, and travels to England to search for the children’s home. This book uses “found photos” to explain to the reader visually, some of the peculiar children’s abilities. In the afterward, Riggs explains that these photos were found at flea markets, antique stores and via other collectors. They are real photos from years ago, and many are haunting and disturbing, adding a fantastic extra layer to this ethereal story.

For: Fans of magic-realism or the movie “Big Fish”.

26. A Lost Lady / Willa Cather

This is a story about the end of the glory days of the pioneer / railroad age in the American West (is that a thing?). All of this is personified in the character of Mrs. Forrester, the young, charming and lively wife of a captain. The plot follows the last few years of Mrs. Forrester at her peak, and then her decline after her husband dies and their money dries up. Cather explores gender roles and expectations, chance, risk, the wheel of fortune, and the rise and fall of industries. It’s hard not to feel sorry for Mrs. Forrester. Like so many women in the past, she was dependent on external circumstance for so much.

For: History buffs and fans of strong women.

27. The English Patient / Michael Ondaatje

This historical fiction novel brings together four damaged souls at the end of WWII, each of them changed forever by the war, hurt in various ways, and now trying to reorient themselves. As they learn about each other and their different wartime experiences, they start to learn how to care again, how to laugh again. There is no real happy ending, but you sense that these people loved eachother, nonetheless. This is a beautiful book.

For: Fans of wartime novels and people who want emotion-driven stories.

28. Out of Africa / Karen Blixen

I read this after visiting Karen Blixen’s house in Nairobi and learning briefly about her life story. This memoir details her years living in Africa, running her coffee farm after she and her husband split up. Overall, her love for Africa (or at least her version of Africa), is the theme of the book - the landscape, the animals, the indigenous population. Some of her observations are thoughtful and careful. Others are ethnocentric and generalizing. After all, this book was written in a different time. I found myself wondering if her outlook would be different in 2014. Consider this book a love letter to Africa and to a vanishing place and time - vanishing ideals, vanishing animals, vanishing tribes. 

For: Those who want to read the classics, history fans, those who love beautiful descriptions.

29. Rules of the Wild / Francesca Marciano

I loved this story about the white ex-pat community in Nairobi in the 1990s. It looks at a complex love triangle between protagonist Esme and two men with very different outlooks on Africa: Adam, a white man born and raised in Kenya, who loves its wilderness and romanticizes the country; and Hunter, a British journalist covering Rwanda’s genocidal horrors. The author, speaking through Esme, articulates so many of the conflicting feelings I had while in Africa but couldn’t necessarily put into words. This quote stuck with me: “…we are all stuck here because this place makes us look good. Nobody could live like this and have such a good time for the same amount of money anywhere else in the world… We have servants, we don’t pay taxes, we go to lots of dinner parties, we play explorers over the weekend, we look healthy and tanned all year round and we can always blame it on the Africans when things are not running smoothly. It’s such a bargain!”

For: Travellers and those wanting to learn about life in another country.

30. London Fields / Martin Amis

This is a long, tough read. Amis rambles, the prose is disjointed, and for someone who thought they had a great vocabulary, Amis used lots of words I didn’t know. And I’ll be honest, I was too lazy to look them up. Our narrator is Sam, an author, and he’s kind of unreliable. The action follows Nicola, a macabre woman in her mid-30s living in London in 1999. Sometimes she gets vague premonitions, and she knows that soon she’ll be killed. Oddly, she craves death, and decides to help move the plot along by goading and playing potential murderers off each other. As Nicola plots and moves closer to her death, so too does society and the world. We learn that nature is a mess, and getting worse. There is no optimism in this book. I found Amis’ writing pretentious and naval-gazing, and I didn’t appreciate his portrayals of women. All I saw were tired tropes. I was not a fan of this novel.

For: Fans of dark, twisted plots.

31. Drunk Mom / Jowita Bydlowska

This memoir is a powerful portrayal of an alcoholic who’d been sober for three years and relapses shortly after the birth of her first child. And she relapses hard. Bydlowska documents her unraveling in a clear, sparse way, but it’s an emotional read too, full of shame, denial, fear, embarrassment, paranoia, and various attempts to stop drinking. It’s also full of so much love for her son. My favourite section was a chapter called “Archeology” towards the end of the book. In it, Bydlowska details all the myriad reasons why she might be an alcoholic - alienation as a new immigrant, a sexual assault, a dysfunctional family, post-partem depression, not fitting in, etc. But she also admits, that even if none of the above things had occurred, she might still have become an alcoholic. At the end of the day, we just don’t know why some people are more likely to become addicts. This is a poignant read by a brave woman.

For: New moms, those suffering from addiction, people interested in learning about personal struggles and what it’s like to be an addict. Fans of “A Million Little Pieces” (but this is better, and fully true).

32. Sacred Hearts / Sarah Dunant

It’s 1570 in a convent in Ferrara, Italy. New novice Serafina does NOT want to be there. She had no idea she was to become a nun until shortly before she arrived (she was in love with a man below her class, so her parents sent her away). Zuana, the dispensary nun, takes Serafina under her wing and tries to help. This is an insightful and detailed glimpse at a space where women, though essentially imprisoned, ran the show and made all of the decisions. In that time, they wouldn’t have been able to do so anywhere else. On the flip side, Dunant sheds light on a fact of that time - convents were often places for the disabled, the ugly, the slow, the rebellious, and regular women who couldn’t afford a dowry - basically anyone unable or unwilling to marry. The vast majority of these women went to the convent unwillingly.

For: History buffs, feminists, and to an extent, fans of political thrillers.

33. Men Explain Things to Me / Rebecca Solnit

This collection of essays explores the subtle and overt ways that women are silenced and erased now, and throughout history - domestic violence, rape, street harassment, dress codes, religion, losing one’s names, and “mansplaining” (a now ‘hot’ term meaning men who explain things to women who are already well-versed in the topic). Solnit is both humorous and candid in her writing, evoking both laughter and pain. At times she favours writing poetically, and at times she employs cold, hard facts. It’s a useful combination. I thought of this collection as a rallying cry, urging the reader to believe women when they tell their own stories.

For: Those interested in feminist theory / readings.

34. Me Talk Pretty One Day / David Sedaris

This was my first gander at reading Sedaris. I enjoyed it and smiled a lot while reading these non-fiction anecdotes about his life, but only laughed out loud once. I blame this on myself, not the author. I almost never laugh out loud while reading. The stories are mostly funny tales about David’s childhood, family, his experience coming out, various odd jobs, his artistic attempts and his time overseas in France. The writing is awkward and cringe-worthy, but also sweet and endearing at times.

For: Those needing a laugh. 

35. If I Stay / Gayle Forman

17-year-old Mia has a pretty great life - loving parents she gets along with, a little brother she loves, a promising potential career as a cellist, and an adoring boyfriend. But everything is called into question when she and her family are in a horrible car accident and (small spoiler) not everyone survives it. Right after the crash, Mia has an out of body experience during which she must decide whether to let go and die to be with her family, or to fight and stay alive for her friends, for music, and for her boyfriend, but as an orphan. The writing style wasn’t to my taste - it was a bit silly and old-fashioned, but the plot is powerful and tragic.

For: YA fans, family drama fans. Maybe fans of Jodi Piccoult?

36. Alligator / Lisa Moore

This Canadian story takes place in present day St. John’s, circling around a handful of characters dealing with loss and emptiness - the death of a loved one, the loss of your home, your life dream, etc. I felt for each of the characters, but something was missing for me. I didn’t get sufficiently pulled in. This may have been due to the disjointed writing style. It stutters and rambles and I didn’t like that. The cast of characters includes a teen eco-warrior, a hot-dog vendor, a Russian mobster, a grieving mother, a dying filmmaker and a washed-up actress.

For: Can lit fans.

37. All the Light We Cannot See / Anthony Doerr

This is a compelling, beautifully written web of a story. Doerr’s characters are so fleshed out and easy to love, despite their faults. The novel begins with two separate stories verging into one. The first is about Marie-Laure, a French girl who goes blind at age six. Her father makes sure she becomes self-sufficient and is so supportive. Their relationship melted my heart. When German invades Paris in WWII, they escape to St-Malo to live with Marie-Laure’s PTSD-suffering great uncle. The second story is about German orphan Werner and his little sister Jutta, living in a children’s home in a German mining town. Because of a natural knack for engineering, Werner is snapped up by the Nazi Party to go to a special training school and eventually serve in a special army unit. We follow Werner’s journey from wanting to serve to wondering what in the hell the Nazis are doing. This is a wonderful story about love and hope, and about redemption, and about moving on because there’s nothing else to do.

For: Those who like to cry, book clubs, historical fiction fans.

38. The Maze Runner / James Dashner

Thomas wakes up in a moving elevator. He doesn’t know where he is, how he got there, or who he is other than his first name. When the elevator stops and opens, there are 50-odd teenaged boys standing over him in ‘The Glade’ - a big, green area surrounded by a giant maze. All of the other boys arrived previously, just like Thomas had. No one remembers anything about the time before the maze. A day after Thomas arrives, a girl arrives and everything starts to change. Though I hated the dialogue and repetitive fight scene descriptions, I loved the plot. This is a suspenseful page-turner. Consider it a cross between “The Hunger Games” and “The Lord of the Flies” (but not as good as either).

For: YA dystopian fans.

39, 40, 41. The Scorch Trials, The Death Cure, The Kill Order / James Dashner

After “The Maze Runner”, I read the final two books in the trilogy as well as the prequel to the series. Each provides more clues and insights into this new world and the reasons for the maze.

42. The Politics of Being Ugly / Kayla Altman

This was an exciting read because Kayla is a real-life friend of mine and this is her first published collection of poetry! Her poems are visceral, dark and haunting with a fairy-tale gone wrong twist to them. There are alternating feelings of absurdity and sweetness, and some tender and funny moments. There is also an underlying current of serious vulnerability - the idea of being consumed, annihilated, powerless.

For: Poetry fans, people who like the fairy-tale genre mixed with darker elements.

43. Detroit: An American Autopsy / Charlie LeDuff

I read this in preparation for a weekend trip to Detroit this autumn. LeDuff, a journalist and native Detroiter, looks at the rise and fall of Detroit both through a personal lens, sharing his family’s hardships and triumphs, and through a larger lens, looking at race, class, immigration and the industrial complex. Through his writing, you definitely get the sense that LeDuff is a ‘dude’, which made him a bit inaccessible to me, but his writing and focus is still powerful. LeDuff explores the slow death of the factories, the house foreclosures, the arsons, the shifting neighbourhood demographics, religion, city hall politics, and the way nature is reclaiming parts of the city. Things are grim, but the resilience of the people of Detroit is the hopeful takeaway of this non-fiction account.

For: Those interested in sociological changes, urban planning, industry, Americana and cautionary tales.

44. The Book of Life / Deborah Harkness

This is the third book in the witch/vampire love story trilogy I wrote about earlier in this list. In the conclusion, we learn about the secrets of the ancient book, and it turns out to be the origin story of witches, vampires and daemons. This is a suspenseful, rich and textured story mixing past and present, science and myth. I would love to see a fourth instalment, as there are some suspicious loose ends.

45. Serena / Ron Rash

My book club read this and we all loved it, which is really saying something. Rash takes us to the haunting and beautiful forests of North Carolina in the late 1920s. There, George and Serena Pemberton own a logging camp. They are a passionate, overly ambitious couple, and to put it bluntly - they start killing anyone in the way of their success without remorse. They are chilling in their nonchalance. Things get complicated when George’s ex and illegitimate child come to Serena’s attention as potential threats. Despite being a terrible person, Serena is also kind of an anti-hero and a feminist figure. She’s confident, powerful, independent, unafraid, unashamed of sex and of ambition. She’s incredibly intriguing. 

For: Historical fiction fans, people who love beautiful settings.

46. Hollow City / Ransom Riggs

This is the second novel in the “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” series (see review further above). Riggs continues the story of Jacob and the peculiar children on their journey, which I won’t discuss to avoid any spoilers. This book includes found photos like the first instalment. 

47. The Heiresses / Sara Shepard

This novel is by the author who wrote the “Pretty Little Liars” series (which I’ve never read or watched). Consider it “Gossip Girl”, but about adults in their mid to late-20s, not teenagers. The plot follows the five Saybrook heiresses, sisters/cousins who are part of the very wealthy Saybrook family. One of the cousins commits suicide… or did she? Was she murdered? If so, why? What secrets had she uncovered? This is a quick, juicy read, but it is not believable. The dialogue is silly, and the story would likely make a better TV show or movie, as is often the case with these types of novels.

For: Fans of Gossip Girl, Pretty Little Liars, Desperate Housewives, etc.

48. The Woman in Black / Susan Hill

In October of this year I started reading scary books to get in the Halloween mood. I love frightening reads, and this book did not disappoint. I’d seen the movie based on this book previously, so had a vague idea about what to expect, but the twists and turns were still spooky and surprising. Hill follows Arthur Kipps, a young lawyer on his first assignment outside of London, tasked with wrapping up the affairs of an old woman who’s just passed away. Things start to get creepy and bizarre as Arthur realizes the townsfolk don’t like to talk about the woman, or the family’s past, or their now empty, giant house. Arthur’s slow, disturbing discovery of the family’s secrets is well done. This is a classic ghost story set in an ethereal, lonely, beautiful place.

For: Fans of classic ghost stories and British mysteries.

49. Ten / Gretchen McNeil

This is a well-written, well-plotted teen horror story. It follows ten very distinct teens (the quiet bookworm, the party girl, the jock, the stoner, the over-achiever, etc.) who are invited to a private party on a remote island. One by one, they start to die in very distinct ways. In order to survive, they’ll need to find out what they have in common, and why someone would want them all dead. This is a fun, suspenseful page-turner that also looks at the changing dynamics of teen friendships as they prepare to leave high school - feelings of abandonment and escape, and the idea of the ‘fresh start’. 

For: Fans of the movie “Scream”.

50. The Ocean at the End of the Lane / Neil Gaiman

A middle-aged man returns to his childhood hometown for a funeral and finds himself literally driving down memory lane, to the farm of his childhood neighbours, who still live there. While visiting, memories from one particular, extraordinary summer come flooding back to him, and he must try and make sense of it all. This is a magical, mythical, folkloric story about a time before time, about the beginning, about fear, belief, faith, friendships, and how to best live your life.

For: Fans of myth and folklore and fantasy fans.

51. Through the Woods / Emily Carroll

This was my first foray into the world of graphic novels. Carroll gifts us with a beautifully illustrated collection of short ghost/horror/creepy tales that older kids and adults into this genre will love. This is a book to read while sitting by the fire under a blanket, and will become a yearly Halloween tradition for me. The stories are classics and all take place in “olden times”, involving a body snatcher, a murderous husband, and disappearing little girls.

For: People who loved ghost stories as a kid (and still do).

52. A Ghost a Day / Maureen Wood and Ron Kolek

This book provides a very short (1-2 pages) account of a haunting for each day of the year. the cool thing is that the tales are from all around the world and from all time periods. This is not a scary read, as the stories are presented as factual accounts of supposedly supernatural occurrences, but it’s historically, culturally and geographically interesting.

For: Ghost lovers.

53. Love Enough / Dionne Brand

This novel takes place in present day Toronto, some of it in my neighbourhood, which was fun. The plot follows a number of Torontonians through the space of a few days. The characters are connected, but not necessarily connecting with each other the way they need to be. In fact, disconnection seems to be a key theme. Everyone feels very passionately, but they are all scared or angry or lonely or lost and can’t seem to express their feelings to their loved ones. This is a bittersweet, realistic, sometimes gritty, sometimes lovely look at good but kind of broken people.

For: Can lit fans, those who love unflinching portrayals of life.

54. The Husband’s Secret / Liane Moriarty

This is an Australian family drama, looking at the long-term consequences of people’s actions. The author asks, if an otherwise lovely person does one very awful thing, are they “bad”? Do they deserve to be punished? Moriarty weaves together different stories of people living in Sydney to a dramatic and shocking conclusion.

For: Fans of Jodi Piccoult, family drama fans.

55. Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures / Vincent Lam

This is a series of short but interconnected stories about four med students as they progress through school and their residencies, mainly taking place in Toronto. There are intense disturbing scenes of medical trauma, there are sweet moments of tender bedside manner, there is coldness, the desire to numb their feelings, and there are cases that stick with them. Lam looks at SARS, mental illness, pregnancy, medical evacuations, dissections, exams, etc. We’re provided with some thoughtful insights into the doctor/patient relationship, the role of the medical profession, and the reasons why people become doctors.

For: Can lit fans, those wanting an inside glimpse into the lives of doctors.

56. Angela’s Ashes / Frank McCourt

Yup, I’m pretty late to the game on this one. It’s been on my ‘to-read’ list for years. This is McCourt’s memoir about growing up poor in 1930s Ireland. The writing style is conversational and long-winded, but never boring. McCourt paints vivid descriptions of hunger, poverty, Irish Catholicism (no birth control, therefore lots of babies, many who wouldn’t survive long), alcoholic fathers who can’t provide for their families, gender roles and sibling relationships. There are funny, coming-of-age anecdotes and sad, painful anecdotes often involving McCourt’s father, who lived for “the drink”.

For: History fans, those who like gritty stories or family dramas.

57. The Christmas Books: Volume 2 / Charles Dickens

This collection is three novellas in the classic Dickens Christmas style. There are cozy homes, cheery hearths, holly, snow, and church bells. All the stories end well despite any sadness, confusion and mistaken identity story lines happening beforehand. The stories are also chock full of classic English Christmas imagery, which is why I loved them.

For: People who love “A Christmas Carol”.

58. Outlander / Diana Gabaldon

I had to see what the fuss was all about! This is the story of Claire, a woman on her second honeymoon in Scotland in 1945. She and her husband Frank are reconnecting after being separated for years by WWII. Claire touches an ancient stone and is sent back in time to 1745, and is quickly kidnapped by a group of highlander clansmen. She ends up developing feelings for one of them, Jamie, and is torn between trying to get back to Frank and her own time, and staying in 1745 with Jamie. Gabaldon explores clan loyalty vs. family ties, English and Scottish political tensions, gender roles, superstition, magic, folklore, and loving two people at once. Bonus, there’s even a fun Nessie sighting!

For: Fans of Twilight, historical fiction fans, fantasy fans.

So, final thoughts? 

My favourite books of 2014 are:

Ripper

All the Light We Cannot See

A Discovery of Witches

Through the Woods

Rules of the Wild

Dead North: Canadian Zombie Fiction

Life After Life

For a visual list, here's the 2014 Pinterest board of book covers.

[suchagiantnerd]

In The Hall

A little vignette based on actual events during my days at university. Names have been changed to protect both the innocent and guilty.

The four friends lounged lazily in Rebecca’s bedroom on the top floor of the townhouse. They’d all had a long, hard day on campus, consisting of a single two-hour history lecture. Tonight, they were taking a well-deserved break from the hectic pace of student life.

The group was on their third round of beer and the fifth episode of Dateline when Von suddenly demanded that they shut the bedroom door. “I can see something moving in the hallway,” Von explained. “Kind of a floating face…” Despite that fact that Von’s only talents were neglecting his pet hamsters to death and being a human encyclopedia on Sponge Bob Square Pants, a chill moved through the room. Maybe Von, in addition to creating the campus Sean Paul fan club, could also sense the presence of ghosts?

Melinda closed the door. “Can you describe the face you saw out there?” she asked quietly. “I can do better than that”, Von declared, and began sketching frantically on a Domino’s Pizza napkin. The three girls huddled together on the bed, frightened and fascinated by Von’s fervor and the possibility of a ghost in their house.

An entire episode of Dateline later, Von finished. He was covered in sweat, clenching and unclenching the hand that had been gripping the pen. “I hope this doesn’t scare you,” he whispered and slowly passed the napkin to Kay.

The girls examined the sketch. “This….is what you saw?” Rebecca asked. The drawing might have been worthy of a “great job” sticker from a third grade teacher. Definitely not gold star material. The face was a crude triangle, the eyes two scribbles, and oddest of all, the creature appeared to have a perfect pig snout. Von looked on expectantly.

“So, are you thinking of getting another hamster anytime soon?” Melinda asked.

[suchagiantnerd]

Grade Four Track Meet

Below, a very short story loosely based on my actual grade four track meet experience. Inspired by an actual diary entry that I've included at the bottom of the story. OH GOD.

The night before the race, she’d lovingly drawn a picture of herself in her diary, beaming, standing on a podium with an Ottawa Carleton District School Board medal around her neck. And for some reason, though a terrible athlete all her short life, she wrote down that winning a medal was one of her life’s dreams. This wasn’t true at all, but she was at that age where keeping a diary was a solemn thing, and all entries had to be of life and death importance. She’d also just learned about the power of visualization while watching a rerun of Oprah. And so, with a final few, grave strokes of the pen, she drew some haphazard wavy lines outward from the medal, to indicate how shiny it was, closed her diary, and went to sleep.

Years later, when she looked back on the race, it was a blur. She certainly didn’t win. But she doesn’t remember anything else about it. Only what happened before…

First, the announcement over the speaker calling the grade four girls to the starting line. That tinny voice made her stomach drop. She and her best friend Annie hurried down the bleachers to the track. But there was a fence in the way! Blocking the path to the track! How were they supposed to get around in time? Oh, god, why hadn’t they planned their route in advance? The girl swung her head around in panic, looking for a teacher, an adult who would know what to do. But it was just kids. A sea of shouting, pushing, hyena-like kids. Annie, an actual athlete, began climbing the fence. “It’s the quickest way!” she shouted, already at the top. “Come on!” Never having climbed a fence before, the girl hesitated. But, it seemed it was the only way to get to the starting line in time. She put a tentative toe in the patchwork of chain link, then lifted her other foot off the ground and did the same with it. Now thirty whole centimetres off the ground, her confidence grew. Maybe she was athletic after all? Visions of the medal flashed before her eyes as she climbed higher and reached the top. What a feeling! She was just like her tomboy heroines in books, next thing you knew, she’d be climbing trees and helping the police solve mysteries.

As she started her descent on the other side of the fence, she heard a distinct, loud RRRIIIIIIIIIIPPP. “Annie!” she screamed in fear. “Annie!!!” But Annie was already out of earshot, jogging towards the starting line. The girl swiveled her head to assess the damage. Her shorts had ripped and were caught on the top of the fence. She was stuck. STUCK! And still no teacher, no bastion of adult safety and order in sight. A small crowd of kids had started to gather. Some laughed, some just stared in horror and pity, and one particular monster with a cowlick began calling her “pooser”, a burgeoning playground term that cleverly combined the words “poo” and “loser”.

As the chants of “pooser” grew louder, all the girl could do was wrack her brain about what pair of underwear she’d worn today. Was it the plain blue pair? Please god, let it be the plain blue pair, she prayed. She vowed never again to make the decision about which underwear to put on in the morning so lightly.

Her gangly limbs awkwardly splayed across the fence and the seagulls circling ever closer, the first tear trickled out of the corner of her eye. This was it. This was where she would die. She hoped her sister wouldn’t get her Cupcake Girl doll. It was only fair that she be buried with it, after all. I wonder if David S. will come to my funeral, she pondered, drifting in and out of consciousness. The sun beat down, her eyes closed for the last time, and as she daydreamed about the patent shoes her mom had refused to buy, but which she’d certainly be buried in, she felt a hand on her shoulder.

“Do you need some help?” asked a teacher.

Actual diary entry. What in God's name...

[suchagiantnerd]

60 Books, 1 Year

In 2012, I challenged myself to read 50 books. For 2013, I decided to up my goal to 60. I cheated a little bit, finishing on January 1, 2014. Please don’t tell.

Below are 60 mini-reviews, in the order I read the books. There are winners, losers, and one inside-look at the world of soap operas.

My Sister’s Keeper / Jodi Picoult

I admit, I was really late to the party on this one. Picoult’s study of a suburban family struggling with middle child Kate’s leukemia is incredibly painful to read. My sympathy for youngest child, Anna, conceived (successfully) in the hope that she would be a perfect donor match for Kate, was immense. How do you reconcile loyalty to your family with the desire for autonomy over your own body?

For: People who love wrestling with ethical issues and people who love cryin’.

Astray / Emma Donoghue

This collection of short stories, all based on actual historical events, was full of strong, subversive female characters; women who generally don’t get a voice in most historical accounts of events. We also get perspectives from others on the fringe – a black slave, an animal, a child solder, a lesbian, a criminal. These were such rich stories, Donoghue could easily build a novel out of any one of them.

For: People interested in women’s history and women ‘lawbreakers’

Warm Bodies / Isaac Marion

As soon as I saw the trailer for this movie, I knew I had to read the novel, which spins a love story between a zombie named R, and Julie, a healthy human being. Adorable, sweet, and at times both hopeful and sad, the author seems to ask if we caused the zombie apocalypse ourselves. Did we just unleash so much evil in the world that it eventually overtook us completely?

For: Romance lovers looking for a new twist on the genre

Anna Karenina / Leo Tolstoy

Well, I finally understand the meaning of “epic novel”. The fact that this book is titled “Anna Karenina” is misleading. It’s about so many more people than Anna alone. There are multiple main characters. In fact, the book explores a time and a place more than anything else, asking the big questions like “What is happiness?” “What is faith?” “What is the point of it all?”

For: People crossing the classics off their list

The End of the Alphabet / CS Richardson

My sister lent me this charming novella about a 40-year old man who finds out he has just one month to live. He and his wife decide to spend it traveling to a new city each day, one city for each letter of the alphabet. Sweet and heartbreaking, I wondered how a couple even begins to broach the inevitable going of one or the other? I certainly had to stop myself from crying on the subway as I read this.

For: People who love love and people who love cryin.

The Casual Vacancy / J.K. Rowling

I think I would classify this novel as a tragicomedy. Though it didn’t seem to get the best reviews, I really enjoyed it. Rowling combined Austen-style satire of small-town life and politics with the tragedies of modern society – poverty, addiction, rape, depression, bullying. It read like a somewhat darker version of Coronation Street.

For: People who love British fiction

Good in Bed / Jennifer Weiner

Weiner paints the story of Connie, a larger woman whose life is defined in part by her body image. After breaking up with her long-time boyfriend, she embarks on a year-long journey of discovery and new experiences. Despite Weiner’s good intentions and positive message, I really didn’t like Connie’s character. She’s annoying and terribly unfunny, though Weiner tries to ram it down our throats that Connie is a very funny woman.

For: People who love Bridget Jones

We Need to Talk About Kevin / Lionel Shriver

I loved this book. It felt so real, so possible, and I read it only two months after the Newtown shooting. I empathized very much with Eva, Kevin’s mother – her uncertainly about having children, her dislike of so many everyday things, her beliefs and behaviours. I also felt fearful throughout the whole book, and rightly so. The ending tore my heart out. Can people that murder so methodically feel love? Warning: This book doesn’t provide the answer to that question.

For: People fascinated by psychological abnormalities

A Room with a View / E.M. Forster

It’s 1908, and a group of British tourists get to know each other in Italy. The times are changing. Victorian attitudes are fading, but still permeate many people’s lifestyles. During a coming-of-age summer, naïve yet curious Lucy meets George, a lower class, yet kind and smart young man. Thus begins a battle between the expectations of Lucy’s family and her heart.

For: Those who love coming-of-age novels

Out of the Easy / Ruta Sepetys

This young adult novel takes place in 1950’s New Orleans and follows 17-year-old Josie through a very tumultuous time in her life. Josie’s mom is a prostitute, and therefore, Josie lives in (and grew up in) a brothel, witness to both the worst kind of people as well as love and kindness from unexpected places. Though I loved the setting (I’m a Big Easy fan), the writing (dialogue, nicknames, slang) seemed a bit too contrived and hokey. The main problem in the story was also way too easily resolved.

For: Historical fiction fans

The Reader / Bernhard Schlink

In post-WWII Germany, 30-year-old Hanna helps 15-year-old Michael when he is very ill. They subsequently begin an affair. It’s both a sexy and cozy, intimate relationship. Years later, after their affair has ended, Michael, a law student, discovers that Hannah is now being tried for atrocious crimes committed during the war. This novel raised such difficult questions about obeying orders and doing your job, even if you’re asked to do terrible things. The most poignant moment of the whole book is when Hannah asks the judge, very seriously, “What would you have done [if you were in my shoes]?” The judge can’t provide a good answer.

For: Philosophy nerds (or people who like pondering life’s tough questions)

The Old Man and the Sea / Ernest Hemingway

This is a simply written novella about an old Cuban fisherman who hasn’t caught a fish in 84 days. The book takes place on Day 85. The man does catch a fish on Day 85 – a giant, fighter of a marlin. What follows is an epic struggle between man and fish, which I suppose means so much more – man versus nature, persistence and hope, loneliness, pride, and fighting off insanity.

For: Renaissance men

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake / Aimee Bender

I loved this novel, partly for the fact that it’s heavy with magic realism. It follows Rose, who discovers as a child that she can taste other people’s emotions in the food that they bake, cook or prepare. As she navigates these new and often troubling experiences, she begins to realize that her brother, Joseph, is also gifted but in a different and even more fascinating way. Joseph’s unbelievable storyline was my favourite aspect of the book.

For: People who love ‘quirky’

Alias Grace / Margaret Atwood

This novel about Grace Marks, a 15-year-old convicted of murdering her master and his housekeeper in mid-1800’s Toronto, was very touching. Grace only remembers snatches of the fateful day, and truly doesn’t know whether or not she committed the murders. As readers, we keep wondering – is she guilty or innocent? Sane or insane? Possessed by spirits? Atwood also explores the era’s obsession with spiritualism, hypnotism, fortune-telling and sleepwalking.

For: Historical fiction fans and people interested in women’s roles throughout history

Jazz / Toni Morrison

Morrison provides a stream of consciousness narration by an omnipresent narrator. The narration follows a number of African-American people somewhat connected between the late 1800’s and the 1920’s in both New York City and the surrounding countryside. While reading, I felt this overarching sense of longing – for love, for absent parents, for respect, for youth, for a sense of belonging. New York City is a character as well – a living, breathing entity that offers escape and salvation, a place that welcomes everyone but can also hurt.

For: Those interested in a different type of story-telling

The Perfect Art of Imperfection: My Life So Far / Crystal Chappell

I borrowed this autobiography from my friend Chantal, a fellow Days of Our Lives fan. Though Chappell’s writing isn’t great, it’s an interesting account of her rough childhood and rise to relative fame in the soap opera world. There is lots of juicy, behind-the-scenes gossip about Days of Our Lives and Guiding Light, which I devoured. Chappell also provides insight into her labour of love, the webseries “Venice: The Series”, which features a lesbian woman as its main character.

For: Die-hard soap opera fans

Midnight’s Children / Salman Rushdie

Rushdie’s detailed novel combines historical fiction and magic realism, creating a story that asks readers to suspend their belief and allow a melding of fact, experience and metaphor. Narrator Saleem Sinai is born on the eve of India’s independence, and is therefore “tied to history”. His life, in fact, mirrors India’s evolution as a country. This book reflects on the meaning of family, time, and the effects of “everything that came before” on an individual. It also explores the theme of transformation; in fact, many of the characters change their names throughout the narrative at key points in their lives.

For: Serious readers – this one is an endeavor, and requires a lot of concentration 

Await Your Reply / Dan Chaon

Chaon weaves together three separate storylines, which eventually connect. This novel explores who we’re born as, and the ties that keep us as that person or not. He plays with identities; the ability to slip them on and off, depending on who we’re around, rebirth, renewal, starting over and running away. We start to learn that some people can’t let go of the past whereas others can’t wait to escape from it.

For: Fans of psychological intrigue. This was ‘thriller-lite’.

Patient Zero / Jonathan Maberry

I love zombie novels, so was very excited to begin reading this one. But guys – it was awful! I suspect that the author is one of those condescending, pretentious, socially unaware losers who gives nerds a bad name. The dialogue was full of clichés from terrible action movies and the characters are laughable shells. The book’s portrayal of Muslims (they all happen to be terrorists) is incredibly racist.

For: No one? Don’t read it.

The Giver / Lois Lowry

Can you believe it? I’d never read this classic until now. This YA dystopian read depicts a community that values ‘sameness’, politeness, rules and respect. However, upon deeper inspection, this society is very controlled. The old, criminals, and weak newborns are ‘released’. You can guess what that actually means. Young Jonas, selected to be the community’s next Receiver (of memories from the old times) starts to wonder if maybe things should change.

For: Dystopian fans. This book is one of the originals.

The Underpainter / Jane Urquhart

Urquhart traces the life of Austin Fraser, a painter, and the lives of his family, friends, and muse of 15 years, Sara. He lives a life of frivolity while all around him his friends go through so much more – war, loss, learning to love, etc. While reading, I found myself wondering lots of things. Once you’ve lived through war, how do you go on? I wondered about the loneliness of survivors of war, the loneliness of artists, the loneliness of those who live alone in the wilderness. I wondered about the artist’s exploitation of human subjects and landscapes.

For: Deep thinkers and lovers of Canadiana

Proof of Heaven / Eben Alexander, M.D.

This memoir is a neurosurgeon’s account of his own near-death experience. The writing style is a bit hokey and immature, but it’s still a hopeful read for people like me – people who believe in science and study, but who desperately want to believe in an existence beyond our bodies.

For: Skeptics and believers both

The Andromeda Strain / Michael Crichton

This is “the official government report” of the discovery and containment of an alien virus that came to earth on one of our satellites. It’s a suspenseful, exciting page-turner. Weirdly, I liked the beginning of the novel best, when things are still chaotic. Once the scientists start making discoveries in the lab, things got a bit advanced for me. There are also no strong female characters. They are wives and support staff. All the scientists, military personnel and doctors are men. However, I’ll cut Crichton some slack, as this was written in 1969.

For: Science Fiction buffs

Saturday / Ian McEwan

This novel takes place in one day: a Saturday (surprise surprise) in February, 2003. Our main character is Henry Perowne, a neurosurgeon and family man who lives a lovely life with his successful wife and two grown children. It’s post-911 London, and Perowne, for all his good fortune, is uneasy about the state of the world. During the story’s climax, Perowne and his family are in fact terrorized, but by an enemy closer to home. McEwan’s writing is beautiful. I think he must have a great appreciation for life’s singular moments.

For: Cultural Studies nerds and those who appreciate beautiful writing

Snow Flower and the Secret Fan / Lisa See

See’s novel takes place in rural 19th Century China and is told from the viewpoint of Lily, a girl from “a so-so family in a so-so village”. Lily’s feet are ideal for a successful footbinding, and due to this ‘blessing’, she is granted the privilege of having a ‘laotong’ or old-same (a penpal of her own age from a more well-to-do family and basically a friend for life). Enter Snow Flower. Lily and Snow Flower go through footbinding, the loss of siblings, marriage, leaving their families, pregnancies, motherhood, disease, and war together. It’s a beautiful novel about the deep friendships between women.

For: Historical fiction fans

The Picture of Dorian Gray / Oscar Wilde

Beautiful, ethereal Dorian Gray is a young man on the cusp of adulthood in 1800’s London. A painter who becomes infatuated with him paints his portrait. Upon seeing the final result, Dorian is confronted with his own youth and beauty, and realizes for the first time how fleeting it is. As the years pass and Dorian becomes more selfish, cruel and sinful, he appears as young and innocent as ever. Wilde examines the themes of identity, the ego, how best to experience life, and Victorian ideals versus an often darker reality in those times.

For: Psychology buffs and those who want to read all the classics

Brother and Sister / Joanna Trollope

Trollope’s story focuses on adoption and the wounds it leaves; primal feelings of rejection. Two British siblings, both adopted, in their 30s and with families of their own, decide to search for their birthmothers, setting in motion a chain of events for everyone involved. Questions of abandonment versus belonging, of choosing versus being chosen, and of power versus inadequacy bubble to the surface.

For: People who love family dramas

The Demonologist / Andrew Pyper

Pyper spins a creepy, disturbing page-turner of a tale about a Columbia Professor whose expertise is Milton’s Paradise Lost. He is called away to Venice to witness a strange phenomenon (which appears to be a case of possession by a demon). What follows is a cross-country journey for the Professor, as he chases after signs and clues, all the while believing more and more that the mythological demons he’s studied for years are in fact real and all around us.

For: People looking for a good, scary thriller

An Unsuitable Job for a Woman / P.D. James

Set in 1970s London and Cambridge, this mystery follows Private Investigator Cordelia Gray, a 22-year-old gumshoe on her first solo case. This is a charming and classic mystery, given the fact that it is pre-technology and CSI. Cordelia solves the case through observation, tenacity, old-fashioned research and by asking questions.

For: Fans of British mysteries

Cleopatra / Duane Roller

This biography is not the same one that came out two years ago to rave reviews. This biography is a more academic text, which admittedly made it difficult to read at times. There were so many names, years, and eras to keep track of. However, there were some well-researched insights into the time, the political climate, cultural expectations, and Cleopatra’s intellect, strategies and love for her kingdom. Cleopatra lived in such a violent time. It seemed that being born a royal or rising the political ranks pretty much guaranteed you a violent end. I kept asking myself, why would anyone seek that out?

For: True history nerds

Sacred Cows / Karen E. Olson

This mystery traces the story of Annie Seymour, a newspaper journalist as she investigates the death of a high-end escort who was also a Yale student. It turns out the case is not as simple as it first appears, and as Annie delves deeper, she endangers herself. Annie also loves pizza, brandy, sex and living alone. She’s plucky, guys.

For: Mystery lovers

Effigy / Alissa York

This novel, inspired by the real-life events of the Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1857, outlines the story of a Mormon family from the viewpoints of all members; the four wives, the husband, the eldest son, a stablehand and an Indian Tracker who assists the husband when hunting. York delves into issues of religion and community, frontier life, oppression, gender roles, outcasts, memory and loss. Every single character was lonely. This is a lovely, haunting book.

For: People who appreciate richly woven stories

Mansfield Park / Jane Austen

This is the tale of poor Fanny Price, who goes to live with her rich aunt, uncle and cousins at Mansfield Park. Three of the four cousins are snooty, spoiled and vain, however cousin Edmund takes Fanny under his wing, and the two become fast friends. Eventually Fanny falls in love with Edmund (gross, I know, but I guess this was cool back then?). Can Edmund ever look at her the same way? There is a serious Cinderella vibe to this story.

For: Fans of the classics and fairy tale lovers

Microtrends: The Small Forces Behind Tomorrow’s Big Changes / Mark J. Penn with E. Kinney Zalesne

This non-fiction book takes a look at 75 microtrends in society today, and the way even just 1% of the population can affect various aspects of society in big ways. Some of the microtrends included teenage knitters, slobs, divorced dads, and vegan children. As the book was published in 2007, it is out of date, but this almost made reading it more fun. I could see which of the trends were now more mainstream, and which never really left the fringe.

For: Cultural Studies aficionados

Digging to America / Anne Tyler

This is a story of two families (the American Donaldsons and the Iranian-American Yazdans) who meet randomly at the Baltimore airport in 1997 while each waiting for a daughter they adopted from South Korea. Having this incredible thing in common, the families stay in touch and become friends. The girls grow up together and the families deal with varying parenting styles, death, disease, culture clashes, and what it means to be American.

For: People who enjoy family sagas

Folly Beach / Dorothea Benton Frank

I wrote a much longer review of this book here. Nuff’ said!

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius / Dave Eggers

This memoir (although the author admits there are a few embellishments) tells the story of Dave Eggers, whose parents die within a month of each other from different cancers. Dave, 21 at the time, takes on the role of main guardian for his 7-year-old brother, Toph. I found the author’s writing quite pretentious, and often scattered and manic, but I absolutely adored his portrayal of the relationship between the two brothers. This is the only book I’ve ever read that actually made me laugh out loud.

For: People interested in people, our inner lives

O Cadoiro / Erin Moure

I decided to throw in a book of poetry this year. Once I stopped trying to fully ‘get it’, I just took in the words and enjoyed the images and emotions they conjured up for me. Maybe this is the secret to reading poetry? For me, Moure’s poems evoked Portugese towns by the sea, cobblestone streets, early mornings, and the pain of love.

For: Brave people or poetry lovers

South of Broad / Pat Conroy

I liked the Charleston setting and the time period this novel was set in, but I wasn’t sold on the incredibly stereotypical characters. Conroy presents us with a classic cast of old-school misfits: the slut, the gay guy, the orphan, the black person, the mentally ill person. They all become friends one year in high school, and the storyline follows them through 20 years of friendship, trials and tribulations. A lot happens, but none of it seems plausible.

For: Fans of ‘The Breakfast Club’

The Virgin Cure / Ami McKay

What happens when you are without the protection of a man in mid-1800’s New York City? You very likely become a prostitute. McKay sketches a strong character in Moth, a newly-orphaned 12-year-old, in training to become a high-class escort (and have her virginity sold to the highest bidder). This is a tough book to read. The one bright point in the story is a lady doctor who befriends Moth, and has dedicated herself to helping poor women and children.

For: Those interested in learning more about the plight of women in this place and time

On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society / Lt. Col. Dave Grossman

This non-fiction book examines the soldier’s reality up until the Vietnam War. Turns out, the vast majority of soldiers will do anything to avoid actually killing another; do support work, aim too high, pretend to shoot, etc. Yay humanity! Grossman also looks at other factors that make it either easier or harder to kill another – distance (physical, cultural, moral), authority, conditioning, risk versus benefit. And finally, he examines the cost of killing for those who actually go through with it.

For: Those interested in human psychology or war

How I Live Now / Meg Rosoff

We don’t know exactly what year it is, but it’s probably only a few years in the future, when NYC native, 15-year-old Daisy, is sent to the English countryside to live with her cousins and aunt. Soon after, the world goes to hell in a handbasket. World War III has started. Rosoff keeps the details vague – England is occupied, but we don’t know by whom, just that they are terrorists. The cousins are separated in the chaos and fight desperately to find each other again. This is an exciting, gritty book. The disturbing aspects rub you the wrong way, but you feel like they are entirely plausible. I really enjoyed this read.

For: Dystopia fans

The Book Thief / Markus Zusak

I rarely cry while reading, but throughout the last few pages of this story, I bawled my eyes out, and kept crying for about another 20 minutes after I’d put it down. It breaks your heart, but to know these characters is worth the heartbreak. The novel follows the story of a 9-year-old German girl sent to live with a foster family in 1939, and the wonderful people she meets in this new home; her foster parents, the boy next door, the Jewish man hiding in the basement, etc. It’s a book for book lovers.

For: People who love beautiful characters and detailed stories

An Abundance of Katherines / John Green

This young adult novel focuses on Colin Singleton, former child prodigy, currently suffering from an identity crisis now that he’s a teenager and his peers are catching up to him intellectually. Oh, and he also dates only Katherines because he’s sooo quirky (this alone annoyed me to no end, not to mention his other grating personality traits). Stuck in this slump, Colin’s best friend takes him on a road-trip, and the two end up in small-town Tennessee where they make discoveries about themselves, friendship, love, and the meaning of success. I found it hard to enjoy this novel as I found Colin and his pal so irritating.

For: People who enjoy light reads

Life As We Knew It / Susan Beth Pfeffer

This is the first book in a YA dystopian trilogy about what happens when an asteroid hits the moon, pushing it closer to Earth, thereby messing with our climate in serious ways. Pfeffer focuses on 16-year-old Miranda, her family, friends and neighbours living inland in Pensylvania. Things start to go quite badly in May, and the novel runs through to March. The author explores how people deal with death, boredom, cabin fever, selfishness and sacrifice. I have to say I loved the premise of this book, but Pfeffer just doesn’t bring it. Things are pretty boring most of the time.

For: People looking for a sad, sad cousin of ‘The Hunger Games’

The Dead and the Gone / Susan Beth Pfeffer

The second in Pfeffer’s trilogy, this novel follows a similar timline to the first book, but the main character is 17-year-old Alex Morales and his family, living in New York City. Alex quickly assumes responsibility for his two younger sisters, as after the asteroid hits, his parents are never heard from again and presumed dead. Alex and his family are religious, whereas the family in Book 1 is not. This added another dimension of focus, as we see Alex try to reconcile his new situation by praying, confessing, and leaning on the church for support.

This World We Live In / Susan Beth Pfeffer

The last in Pfeffer’s trilogy, this book brings together the characters from the first and second installments. Pfeffer seemed too hesitant to take this novel to the next level of intensity, which is what separates her from the big guns like Collins and Roth. A few people die, but even her choice of characters to sacrifice seemed cowardly and hesitant.

Orange is the New Black / Piper Kerman

This is the memoir of Piper Kerman, an upper-middle-class white woman, who at 34, goes to jail for 15 months on a 10-year-old drug charge (she’d smuggled drugs only the one time, against her will, for her then lover). Coming from a place of privilege, Piper provides us with a rare view into the reality of so many women of colour and women of lower economic status. I loved the descriptions of how kind, loving, wise, loyal and creative these women can be under terrible circumstances. I grew angry learning about the ridiculous reasons for their incarcerations and the silliness of the system that put them there. This is an infatuating, eye-opening read.

For: People interested in sociology, law, psychology, women’s studies

Tara Road / Maeve Binchy

Binchy’s main character is Ria Lynch – a naïve, friendly, warm, domestic woman who marries her first love, lives in a big, old gorgeous house and has two children. But….all is not as perfect as it seems. When her personal life explodes, Ria decides to swap houses with a woman in America. Switching places provides to be a revitalizing experience for both women, the catalyst for much-needed change in their lives. This is a very cute story. My only complaint is that many of the characters are unsympathetic and difficult to feel for.

For: People who enjoyed the movie “The Holiday”

Crow Lake / Mary Lawson

This novel paints the story of four suddenly orphaned siblings in small-town Northern Ontario. The eldest brother, at 18, who was just set to leave for Teacher’s College, decides instead to stay home and look after the others, in order to keep them together. His decision sets off a chain of events, feelings, and sacrifices for each of them. I loved all four of the siblings and thought this was a poignant, sweet read examining the good and bad sides of family.

For: CanLit fans

Emancipation Day / Wayne Grady

At the end of WWII, we meet Jack, a young sailor from Windsor, stationed in Newfoundland and living a somewhat secret life. He is from a biracial family, but he himself easily passes as white, and is currently doing just that. He meets and seduces Newfoundland native, Vivian, a white woman. After they are married, Vivian starts to uncover the truth about Jack’s family and history, and must make some tough decisions. Grady does a good job of exploring issues of dual identity and belonging. The knife-in-the-heart ending is also fantastic. Reading it was like a kick to the gut.

For: Historical fiction fans and people interested in the inner motivations of others

Ontario Ghost Stories / Barbara Smith

I read this before Halloween to get in the mood. Was I embarrassed reading it on the subway? Most definitely. Did that stop me? Oh no. I have to say, the collection seemed hastily put together, as the writing is sloppy and silly. But there were some interesting regional ghost stories that anyone would enjoy.

For: Campfire story nerds

Grizzly Dance / Ann Love

Love’s novel, set in 1970’s small-town Yukon, follows new RCMP Officer Warren Tasker, sent to patrol his hometown one weekend. Lo and behold, a local environmental activist is murdered, and Warren is pulled right back into the town’s events. The who-dunnit takes into account the town’s new mine development, the racism of some white people toward the First Nations community, and the dirty laundry of some of the local families. My favourite part of the novel was actually the gorgeous descriptions of the landscape – the mountains, river, and forest.

For: Mystery aficionados looking for a change of scenery

Night Film / Marisha Pessl

I loved loved loved this mind-fuck of a novel. Pessl kicks things off with the apparent suicide of Ashley Cordova, daughter of elusive filmmaker Stanislav Cordova (whose films are so crazy and frightening, that they are only shown illegally, underground). Journalist Scott McGrath figures that there’s more to the story, and starts investigating the Cordova family. As he digs deeper, there are only more questions, each more frightening than the last. Pessl does a good job of dealing with questions of myth versus reality, privacy, public relations, fandom, mental illness, reclusiveness, and the mind of the artist.

For: Film buffs and those who like a good thrill

Allegiant / Veronica Roth

The last book in Roth’s “Divergent” trilogy is also the worst (and I’m not a big fan of the trilogy to begin with). I continued to feel nothing for these characters. She kills so many of them off before even allowing us to get attached to them. I also feel like she relies way too much on serums. Serums seem to be able to do everything in Roth’s world. To me, it’s lazy writing and plotting. This book is a mess.

For: Anyone who read the first two and need to just get this over with.

The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared / Jonas Jonasson

I’d heard so much good hype about this novel, and so I was quite excited to read it. Sadly, I was hugely disappointed. This feels like a story for story’s sake. The characters are just that – quirky, weird shells with no real depth or heart. Their morals are also extremely questionable and hard to empathize with. The plot itself is soooo implausible and ridiculous, I was not invested. There is nothing to gain from reading this book, in my opinion.

For: People who like a very linear story with interesting twists and turns. That’s it.

True Confessions of a Heartless Girl / Martha Brooks

17-year-old Noreen drives into Pembina Lake, MB late one night, clearly running from something. The town reluctantly takes her in while she sorts herself out (with some help). This is a book about many people, each broken in his or her own way. As the novel progresses, it looks like some of them will learn to let others in and reach out for help. It’s quite a sweet, little story.

For: People who like stories about runaways, fans of coming-of-age tales

Colton Christmas Rescue / Beth Cornelison

This Harlequin novel (of the Romantic Suspense genre) was a Christmas gift from Brad. It follows Amanda Colton, daughter of a rich rancher and mother to baby Cheyenne, and Slade Kent, a cop posing as Ranch Foreman, in order to get to the bottom of two mysteries that have occurred on the ranch. Soon, the sexual tension between Amanda and Slade is undeniable, and you know…they do it (but surprisingly, they only do it once throughout the whole book!). Obviously this book is incredibly silly, but that’s what you want in a Harlequin.

Zoo / James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge

Ph.D. student Jackson Oz starts noticing a rise in violent animal attacks on humans, occurring across the globe. He tries to raise awareness of the issue, but is poo-pooed by the scientific community, drops out of his Ph.D., and begins to research independently. A few years later, it’s clear that Jackson was onto something. The attacks begin to increase rapidly, and soon, no one is safe. Is it too late to save humanity? I quite enjoyed this book, even though it’s clearly written for a male audience. Oz is that combination of nerd / macho lone wolf type, and I found him a bit grating.

For: People who enjoy pandemic or zombie novels

Sharp Objects / Gillian Flynn

Before Flynn rose to fame with “Gone Girl”, she wrote this novel. It’s just as crazy and disturbing, but more subtle and somehow even more sinister. The action revolves around Camille Preaker, a recovering cutter and journalist sent to cover two recent murders in her hometown of Wind Gap. I think I might have sensed a feminist tone from Flynn throughout. There are lots of comments and insights on women’s roles and what happens to women who either submit to or deviate from the roles expected of them. Hint hint: They get labeled slut or lesbian or crazy in most cases (and in extreme cases they get killed).

For: Anyone who enjoyed “Gone Girl”

Well, there you have it. For those who prefer a visual list, check out my 2013 Book Pledge Pinterest board.

[suchagiantnerd]

50 Books, 1 Year

In January of this year, I decided to take the #50BookPledge, a challenge to read 50 books in one year. I’m relieved to say I completed the challenge on November 25, with just over a month to spare.

Of the 50 books:

§  44 were fiction, 6 were non-fiction

§  31 were written by women, 19 by men

§  5 were Canadian

To track my progress, I kept a ‘book journal’ (thank you Mom), which I’ve used to help write this post. For my fellow bookworms, here is a summary of the 50 books. Maybe you’ll find your next read here.

1. Sing You Home / Jodi Picoult

Exploring in-vitro fertilization, parental rights, gay rights and music therapy (phew!), this novel also featured an accompanying soundtrack online (huh?). Ambitious undertaking, but the characters were one-dimensional and the ending was too simple for the complexities presented throughout the plot.

For: Readers who love Jodi Picoult or are curious to learn more about in-vitro fertilization.

2. We Bought a Zoo / Benjamin Mee

This joke Christmas gift from Brad was a result of our horror after seeing the trailer for “We Bought a Zoo”. The memoir is no better. The author comes across as pretentious and the descriptions of the zoo are far too technical for the average reader.

For: People who love zoos. That’s it.

3. Memento Mori / Muriel Spark

This classic follows a group of elderly people in 1950’s London receiving phone calls from a voice telling them “Remember you must die.”

For: Those who love Jane Austen and also have a dark, sarcastic streak.

4. White Teeth / Zadie Smith

A study of the experience of 2nd-generation and biracial Brits, Smith delves into the things we cling to; the past, science, blind faith, unrequited love, legends.

For: People who love fleshed-out characters and Coronation Street

5. The Elegance of the Hedgehog / Muriel Barbery

Translated from the original French, the writing seemed a bit choppy. However, this story is a lovely reminder of the pleasure of moments; a taste, a sound, a particular scene.

For: Readers who love details, readers who enjoy love stories that transcend class

6. Freedom / Jonathan Franzen

My book club’s January pick, this story felt relevant – kind of a ‘story of our times’. Franzen also provided insight into the conservative right’s desperate fight for their ‘freedoms’, a view point previously inaccessible to me.

For: Politically minded people who love current events

7. The Last Cheerleader / Meg O’Brien

A Harlequin romance lent to me by my colleague, this story featured hilarious CSI-style dialogue, over the top coincidences and pointless dead ends in the plot. Even the sex scenes were boring.

For: Anyone looking for a very light read and a bit of a laugh.

8. World War Z / Max Brooks

This novel provides a chronicle of the Zombie War, told from multiple viewpoints, after it has already been won. The author examines every aspect of what might happen if such a war ever occurred; political, geographical, psychological, military, and technological. Bonus: the movie is set to come out this year and stars Brad Pitt.

For: Zombie fanatics

9. Kiss Them Goodbye / Stella Cameron

Another Harlequin read from my colleague, I enjoyed this a lot more than the previous one. In addition to great sex scenes, this novel is set in and around New Orleans (which I love) and featured a surprisingly good murder mystery.

For: Fans of the True Blood books or TV show

10. Wild Stone Heart / Sharon Butala

I would classify this as a memoir / ode to nature / anthropologic examination. One of my Canadian picks, Butala writes about her homestead in Saskatchewan; its seasons, history, landmarks. She also sheds light on the continuing ethnocentricity most Canadians suffer from in regards to our First Nations.

For: Lovers of Canadiana and geography

11. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo / Stieg Larson

I doubt this book requires any explanation. I loved it. Lisbeth is a kickass character and deserves all the praise she’s received.

12. Tears of the Giraffe / Alexander McCall Smith

The 2nd book in “The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency” series, this story revolves around a middle-aged woman detective in Botswana. Written by a white man (albeit from Africa) in the voice of a black woman, I questioned how authentic the main character’s experiences could be, but it is still a pleasant novel.

For: Mystery-lovers craving a change of scenery.

13. Between Shades of Grey / Ruta Sepetys

Not to be confused with ’50 Shades of Grey��, this young adult novel, our March book club pick, chronicles Stalin’s atrocious deportations of Lithuanians, Finns, Latvians and Estonians to remote work camps. A heartbreaking read with lovable, strong characters.

For: History buffs and lovers of teen romances

14. The Hunger Games / Suzanne Collins

I reread ‘The Hunger Games’ in preparation for the film’s release. Just as fantastic and horrifying the 2nd time. If you haven’t read it, you really should.

15. Dubliners / James Joyce

Joyce’ iconic collection of short stories detailing various aspects of life in and around Dublin in the early 20th century was a tough but rewarding read. The stream of consciousness style takes some getting used to, as Joyce almost meanders through his character’s lives. There is lots of sorrow, but glimmers of hope do appear here and there.

For: English Lit buffs

16 & 17. Catching Fire and Mockingjay / Suzanne Collins

I also reread the second and third books in ‘The Hunger Games’ trilogy. Again, I loved the characters this time as much as the first time around.

18. The Girl who Played with Fire / Stieg Larson

The 2nd book in Larson’s trilogy, we learn more about Lisbeth’s past and her hatred of authority.

19. Valley of the Dolls / Jacquelyne Susann

Our April book club pick, this novel is a glamourous, juicy look at the climb to (and fall from) fame in the 1950’s. It’s a dark and fun read that also makes you feel ugly, old and washed-up. Who doesn’t want that?

For: People who love ‘Gossip Girl’ and ‘Mad Men’.

20. The Other Boleyn Girl / Philippa Gregory

I hopped on this bandwagon quite late, but for those who’ve never read it, this look at life inside Henry VIII’s court is sexy, frightening, and anxiety-filled, told from the point of view of Anne Boleyn’s sister. The difficulty? Trying to imagine the petulant King Henry as attractive in his youth.

For: Historical fiction enthusiasts

21, 22 & 23. The “Fifty Shades of Grey” trilogy / E.L. James

What can I say that hasn’t already been said? I think people need to read this simply because of what it is. A piece of pop culture history.

24. The New New Rules / Bill Maher

This satiric series of observations and political commentaries is a fun, quick read.

For: The pinko in you

25. A Tale of Two Cities / Charles Dickens

Dickens chronicles the French Revolution, shedding a light on the dark side of crowds and mob mentality. I fell in love with ne’er-do-well Sydney Carton. And then (spoiler alert) he died.

For: Those of you trying to read all of the ‘classics’ / those of you who love bad boys

26. The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty / Anne Rice

Our book club pick for May was shocking. Rather than the sexy erotica we wanted, we got a dark, twisted story that involved a lot of violent, repetitive spanking, whipping and a lot of crying and degradation. Anne Rice – who are you?!?!

27. Divergent / Veronica Roth

I read this dystopian YA novel, the first in a trilogy, to try and fill the gaping hole left in my heart by ‘The Hunger Games”. Not nearly as good, but it is still an enjoyable read, taking place in a future in which society is divided into 5 factions based on personality traits.

For: Those in ‘Hunger Games’ withdrawal

28. A Beautiful Mind / Sylvia Nasar

This biography that the film version was based on is very technical when explaining John Nash’ theories, but the research into his personal life was fascinating. A cruel, snobby, selfish man, he would never have got anywhere in life if it weren’t for his intellect.

29. Insurgent / Veronica Roth

This sequel to ‘Divergent’ tries to do a bit too much, but was still an enjoyable, dystopian read.

30. Sylvanus Now / Donna Morrissey

Another of my Canadian picks, this is a novel about the Newfoundland experience in the 1950’s, as fishing villages dealt with the growth of large fishing companies and life on the island changed forever.

For: Suckers for stories about the human condition

31. The Kite Runner / Khaled Hosseini

Hosseini paints a gut-wrenching portrait of the regular Afghani people caught in the middle of warring extremists. The characters are beautifully sketched out.

For: People who don’t shy away from heavy, emotionally-draining stories

32. Marching Powder / Thomas McFadden and Rusty Young

Our June book club pick is the non-fiction account of a Bolivian prison that functions as a microcosm of society (with a few sharp differences). Women and children live with their incarcerated husbands and fathers, inmates buy or rent their cells and can run their own businesses. And of course, because it is a prison, there is a certain amount of drugs, violence and murder.

For: Lovers of the weird and absurd

33. Started Early, Took My Dog / Kate Atkinson

This contemporary British mystery explores society’s lost souls; specifically missing and murdered women and children. I think Atkinson is a fantastic writer.

For: People who love British mysteries and Coronation Street

34. When Will There Be Good News? / Kate Atkinson

Throughout this mystery, Atkinson focuses on survivors, resilience and guilt. And pets.

35. The Road / Cormac McCarthy

The most horrifying of my 50 books, ‘The Road’ is not a book you easily forget (and you might want to). McCarthy’s rendering of a post-apocalyptic world is without hope. I found myself asking the question: When there is no hope, is love enough of a reason to keep on living?

36. Cosmopolis / Don DeLillo

DeLillo explores the freedom that can come as a result of self-destruction, as well as the increasing melding of man and machine. This is not a light read.

For: Those in the mood for dark social commentary

37. Goodnight Nobody / Jennifer Weiner

This mystery stars a reluctant suburban housewife feeling erased as a human being while trying to discover who murdered her neighbour.

For: Fans of “Desperate Housewives”

38. Choke / Chuck Pahalniuk

This story about a sex addict trying to pay for his deadbeat mother’s medical bills was too much for me. I couldn’t empathize with any of the characters, and Pahalniuk’s descriptions made me gag at times. Maybe this book was too close a look at the male experience for me.

For: Fans of “Fight Club”

39. The Great Stink / Clare Clark

This mystery, set amidst the sewer system of 1850’s London, follows a civil engineer suffering from PTSD who is accused of a murder in the sewers. Featuring some great Dickensian characters, this story also sheds light on Victorian society’s inadequacy when dealing with mental illness.

For: Dickens fans and history buffs

40. Crash / J.G. Ballard

Following the experiences of a group of car crash fetishists, Ballard seems to ask whether human disfigurement, suffering and death can by sexy, and whether technology will create new sexual possibilities. Reading this novel took me far away from my comfort zone. I would never want to meet the author.

41. Fragile Things / Neil Gaiman

Our August book club pick, this collection of short stories is all about the supernatural, so I loved it. Gaiman’s stories feature ghosts, vampires, gothic romance, aliens, voodoo, and the humanity inherent in all of it.

For: People who love ghost stories around the campfire

42. Dead Reckoning / Charlaine Harris

The latest in Harris’ ‘True Blood’ series was as enjoyable as ever and exactly what you’d expect. Full of sex, vampires and werewolves (all of whom have sex appeal), we also learn more about Sooki and Hunter’s telepathic origins.

43. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks / Rebecca Skloot

Skloot’s non-fiction book tells the true story of Henrietta, a poor, black woman whose cancer cells were removed, grown and studied without her consent in 1951, and the ethical ramifications of this. An eye-opening exploration of race, class, scientific progress, personal freedom, religion and medical ethics.

For: Anyone looking to widen their views

44. The Distant Hours / Kate Morton

This modern gothic novel has it all; a lost letter, a decaying castle, family mysteries, insanity, young love. The characters and plot are so intricate and well thought out. This was one of my favourite reads.

For: Lovers of gothic romances

45. Fugitive Pieces / Anne Michaels

A powerful and painful story of 3 generations of unrelated men, who have a thirst for knowledge in common. Michaels explores loss, grief, presence versus absence, survival, and the passage of fear from one generation to another.

For: People who want another perspective on the Holocaust and World War II

46. The Passage / Justin Cronin

I first read this book two years ago, and loved it so much that I decided to reread it in anticipation of the sequel’s release. Cronin creates an epic dystopian novel about survival after the collapse of a government experiment, creating a super-race of vampire-like creatures that quickly destroy most of humanity. Cronin’s post-apocalyptic world is incredibly detailed and his characters are superbly drawn out.

For: Fans of ‘The Hunger Games’ or ‘The Walking Dead’

47. Gone Girl / Gillian Flynn

Can I say it?  This is a mind-fuck of a novel, and I mean this as a compliment. Flynn’s two unreliable narrators are experts at manipulating eachother and the reader. This is a thrilling, sexy book that keeps you guessing.

For: Anyone looking for a juicy page-turner

48. The Twelve / Justin Cronin

The sequel to ‘The Passage’ did not disappoint. Cronin continues to build his post-apocalyptic world and the survivors’ battle against ‘virals’.

49. The Moonstone / Wilkie Collins

Collins’ novel is considered one of the first novels in the mystery genre. A friend and colleague of Charles Dickens, Collins is critical of religion and society’s treatment of certain visible minorities. He’s not quite so kind toward women. Collins uses lots of surprise plot twists.

For: Fans of Dickens and mysteries

50. Changing Heaven / Jane Urquhart

This is a beautiful novel full of sorrow, loss and storytelling. Weather also plays a big role; wind, storms, snow, rain, and the way weather works on landscapes and people.

For: People who love weather and people who love “Wuthering Heights”

So, what were my favourites? My Top 5 is:

World War Z

Marching Powder

Fragile Things

The Distant Hours

The Passage

If you prefer visual lists, here is my 50 Book Pledge Pinterest board.

[suchagiantnerd]

A Ghost Story

My first shift was five days after I died. I was assigned to cool Ballroom C at the Marriott. I’d never even been inside it before.

I materialized for my shift shortly before 6:30pm and looked for a man with long brown hair and cargo pants. I’d been told that my shift supervisor, Ronald, had passed away in 2031, and had been part of the first group of recruits to the program. 76 years later, it was obvious he was also incredibly dedicated to the mission.

“You my new ghoul?” A man I took to be Ronald had instantly appeared at my side. He looked just like my trainer, Rhoda, had described. Right down to the peace sign on his t-shirt.

“Yes. I’m Daisy Abbott?”

“You’re pretty green, Daisy. Only five days gone? You sure you’re ready to start work right away?”

I wasn’t about to second-guess myself. “Yeah. Yes. I’m ready. I signed up for the program because I believe in it, and I think the sooner I get busy, the better.”

“You were pretty young.” Ronald wasn’t beating around the bush.

“I know,” I replied. “It was unexpected.” Ronald nodded and gestured toward Ballroom C.

“The networking reception starts in about 20 minutes. It’s a bunch of nurses or something, some kind of medical conference. You remember what you’re supposed to do in there?” he asked.

“Circulate the room in a slow, consistent figure-eight pattern. No stopping. No rushing. Don’t get too emotional.” I’d always had a great memory. It was good to see I hadn’t lost that.

“You got it. If you’re not sure about your pace, just match the other ghouls. There are about 20 other recruits on shift. If you find you get thinking too much about before, just take a quick break and calm down.” Ronald’s voice grew softer as he went on. Then he was gone.

*   *   *

I’d always known I’d be a part of the program one day. I just didn’t think it would be so soon. No one plans on dying at 25. And no one plans on dying from a freak head injury caused by a flying palm tree. There are a lot of hurricanes where I come from. In fact, they occur about once a month on average. Normally during a hurricane alert, I’m holed up inside with my roommates and a large quantity of junk food. For whatever reason, five days ago, I just wanted to experience what a hurricane feels like. Let me tell you, it was incredible.

But I don’t recommend it.

*   *    *

“Do they know we’re in here with them?” Ballroom C was now a hive of activity. Off-duty nurses were chatting, laughing, and throwing back vita-tinis. I’d never liked the taste of vita-tinis. They tasted too much like cough syrup.

“They might wonder, but most of the information regarding program specifics is classified, including which locations use paranormal cooling.” Marsha Rathcott was in her 4th year of the program, and seemed to know a lot. She was also being exceedingly patient with me. “There’s no way for a person to tell the difference between air conditioning and paranormal cooling. If we’re doing our jobs right, that is”.

“And if we’re not doing our jobs right?”

Marsha smirked. “It depends. If we’re not being consistent in our pacing and patterns, they’ll feel cold patches. If we get too emotional – sad, angry, or even too cheerful – we might unintentionally cause things to move.”

“We can do that?!” I’d had no idea.

“Don’t get too excited about it!” Marsha laughed. “In my first year, one morning while I was working at a private gym, I started stressing about all the things I never said to my father while I was alive. Before I knew it, the squash racquets were flying off the walls. One guy ended up with a black eye. I felt awful.”

“Awkward!” I stifled a laugh, then paused. “Do you think about life before the program a lot?”

Marsha thought for a moment. “I do,” she said. “But more often, I think about what will happen after my time serving in the program is over.”

*   *   *

Rhoda had been training program recruits for 9 years, and had served in the program for 5 years prior to that. She had died at the age of 45. Drowned in a flash flood. The same way my Grandpa had passed.

On my first day of training, the day after I died, the sense of pride in the training centre was palpable. Rhoda was no exception. Anyone that stayed with the program for longer than the initial five-year contract was a serious enthusiast.

“As you all know, in 2026, scientists confirmed that the human spirit does in fact live on after death. This had many implications on society. Suicide rates rose, religious extremism increased across the globe, and as a result…blah blah blah. You guys can read this stuff on your own if you’re interested. I want to fast forward to the good stuff.” Rhoda looked up from her screen and floated over to us.

“At this same time, world governments were frantically searching for affordable, green energy solutions. Rolling blackouts were now common in most countries, global temperatures were rising, and the oil was running out at an alarming rate. A small group of scientists put forward what was considered a preposterous theory at the time – that the spirits of the dead, in large, organized quantities, could cool the air.” Rhoda smiled to herself. “Though it seems silly now, these forward-thinkers were laughed at by the majority of the scientific community. However, the newly unified Korean government decided to fund preliminary research. The rest is history.”

*   *   *

I signed up for the program the day after my 18th birthday. I remembered thinking how funny it was that at 18, I still couldn’t legally drink a beer, but I could sign the first 5 years of my afterlife away.

Both of my dads were incredibly supportive of my choice, as each of them was a card-carrying spirit donor as well. In Baton Rouge, we see the effects of extreme weather and scarce electricity on a daily basis. Unless you’re extremely religious, almost everybody here signs up to be a spirit donor on his or her 18th birthday. It’s a rite of passage, the way taking your first driving test on your 16th birthday used to be, or so my Grandma told me. Cars haven’t been available to citizens of the Confederate Republic since about 2050 or so. The military requisitioned all working vehicles around that time.

*   *   *

“So what do we do now?” I asked Marsha. We’d just finished our shift at Ballroom C.

“Really, we can do whatever we like, as long as we’re careful about it. The only stipulations are that we don’t gather in large numbers or get too emotional around breathers. Oh, and we can’t travel too far. Did they explain that to you in training?”

I nodded. Rhoda had mentioned that the technology that kept us on earth also confined us to a radius of about 500 miles from the spot where we died.  We could be assigned to shifts anywhere in that radius, and could explore it in our free time as well, but it was impossible to go any further. Well, not impossible exactly. Just irresponsible.

“Have you ever tried to go further?”

“No.” Marsha responded flatly. “I care too much about the program and what we’re doing. I don’t want to risk becoming unstable and accidentally crossing over.”

“I guess the great ruins of Sydney will have to wait, huh?” As a kid, I’d been fascinated by photos of the old abandoned opera house.

“I guess so.” Marsha answered quietly. Had I said something wrong?

“Marsha,” I ventured. “What happens next? After our contract is over?”

“Basically there are two options. You can stay with the program for another 5-year contract, either as a Cooler or a Trainer. Lots of people do this. Like Ronald and Rhoda. They love what this program is accomplishing. Really, you could remain a part of the program forever, if you wanted to.”

“Will you renew your contract?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I’ve got just under a year left to decide, and I really don’t know.”

“So what’s the second option?”

“You choose to cross over. At the end of your fifth year, if you choose not to sign another contract, you disappear. It’s crazy. You just disappear. And no one knows what happens to you after that,” Marsha whispered.

“How is that possible?”

“The technology keeps the spirit on earth, confines it to this realm. But scientists still haven’t been able to figure out what happens after the spirit leaves earth. So for me, on the last day of my fifth year, what do I do? I love the program, but I’ll admit, I’m getting bored.”

*   *   *

It’s been three months today since my first shift, and I’m feeling pretty confident. I’ve made lots of friends, traveled all around my radius, and mastered my float. I’ve also overhead some juicy conversations during my shifts at the Annual Confederate Republic Convention in Houston. I’d always loved political gossip as a breather. It was good to see that my personality hadn’t changed.

I even drop in on my dads now and then. I don’t seem to have any effect on Phillip, but when I hug Marco, his shivers a bit and smiles.

My only regret is that Marsha isn’t here anymore. Two months ago her father died, and Beau Rathcott wasn’t a spirit donor. He also wasn’t a very nice man, according to Marsha. But his death hit her hard.

I’d done her the kindness of floating with her to her radius limit, and then further and further. The last thing she said to me, before she disappeared, was “I’ll send you a postcard from Sydney.”

I smiled and waved goodbye. I know she won’t send a postcard. For one thing, ghosts can’t hold a pen. And for another thing, the southeastern coast of Australia was obliterated in a tidal wave last week.

_____________