Once again, a list of books, fiction and non-fiction in chronological order. This year I am including short story and essay collections since it seems to be a lot of what I read.
Esi Edigyan Half-Blood Blues and yes I did finally get around to Washington Black.
Helen Garner True Stories This is a terrific collection by an Australian journalist and essayist who covers the personal and the political with
Kazuo Ishiguro The Buried Giant
Sally Rooney Conversations with Friends A first-person poetic narrative of a young adult writer navigating friendship, adultery, chronic disease and her own transition to adulthood. And now the second novel, Normal People. is causing a sensation among millennial readers. I read this later on in the year and found myself suffering from generational strain. The characters and their struggles with post-adolescent challenges and the early university issues of relationships, career-versus-relationship, academic success, excesses with alcohol and drugs and individuation from parental influences were not compelling enough for me.
David Foster Wallace Girl With the Curious Hair A collection of eclectic stories I read because I know I will never get to Infinite Jest. DFW is dense, obscure, at times incomprehensible but always entertaining.
Pat Barker The Silence of the Girls This Booker prize-winning author retells the three-thousand-year-old story of the Iliad of Homer, from the perspective of Briseis, the Trojan princess who is captured by the Greeks and presented to Achilles as a trophy. It is a story of penetrating violence detailing (with a novel use of the contraction apostrophe – subject’s for subject is, scattered anachronisms and pseudo-contemporary dialogue) the role of women in a society where they are possessions of powerful men.
It is a story of penetrating violence detailing (with a novel use of the contraction apostrophe –
Significant commodities for females are beauty youth and fertility provided there is the correct paternity. (sound familiar?) Trojan and Greek warriors sacrifice or otherwise murder infants, sons, daughters and wives. The women skirt their way around weaving, nursing, and grieving while minimizing the rape opportunities for the males surrounding them. The exploration of the literal and figurative liminal spaces of the sea goddess Thetis, her son Achilles, his lover, Patroclus and his prize, Briseis are well written and were my favourite parts.
I recommend reading Madeleine Miller’s The Song of Achilles or Circe. And for serious Iliadophiles, consider exploring the first English translation of Iliad by a female classicist, Caroline Alexander (on my to-do list) or wait for the one by Emily Wilson.
Ursula K. Le Guin No Time to Spare This is a collection of non-fiction essays subtitled Thinking About What Matters published in 2017. She died in January 2018 and it was the eulogies that drew me to this collection. The essays are short and brimming with
Jack Hodges The Master of Happy Endings This novel is a continuation of Jack Hodges’ exploration of “moral purpose” from the point-of-view of a retired and widowed English teacher with a passion for swimming and the Northern Gulf Islands. It considers ageing, love and loss, risk-taking and reconciliation. I suspect there is a more-than-a-bit of autobiographical structure in this character. His descriptions of Vancouver Island and the Comox area are detailed and evocative. A Passion for Narrative, his “how-to guide” is a must-read and an enduring reference for aspiring writers.
Gil Courtemanche a good death This work follows A Sunday at the Pool in Kigali (a must-read) and is translated from Quebecois by Wayne Grady. This is the eldest son’s struggle with his difficult father’s irremediable decline due to strokes and Parkinson’s disease. The family divides into the Buddhists or the Medicals in their responses to the undignified and progressive infirmity of the patriarch. The protagonist recruits his nephew and eventually his mother into a plan for a good death. The pain and shame of loving but not liking a difficult parent are exquisitely wrought.
Margaret Atwood Moral Disorder This is a suite (as per Ursula LeGuin and the link is her excellent review) of eleven linked short stories that have as much as I know, a strong autobiographical bent. The odd-ball wilderness parents and misfit developing female, Nell are characters that we have glimpsed at before, in Cat’s Eye for example. I’m inspired to re-read her short story collection in Wilderness Tips. Turns out my copy is autographed but I don’t remember anything I read in 1991. I had two kids under four and was working full-time. And then, I like to find a copy of the Stone Mattress collection from 2014.
Ann Patchett The Patron Saint of Liars This is her first novel and she wrote it before the masterpiece, Bel Canto. It was interesting to read this novel after getting to know the author a bit from her collection of personal essays that I read last year.
It is a story about a Catholic home for unwed mothers in the mid-60’s where all the girls “give-up” their babies immediately after delivery. The story is laced with leavings and losses and the notable emotional absence (incompetence) of the only mother and wife present. The first-person point-of-view structure of the three main characters works well with the daughter’s voice last. I found myself looking up the history of Saints that the characters are named after or pray to. Consider Sister Evangeline’s advice that one’s internal Catholic is a private relationship with God and only your public Catholic is a relationship with the church. And maybe just believing is enough.
Benjamin Dreyer Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style. This is a really humorous and quite handy style guide for the use of written American English by the vice-president, executive managing director and copy chief of Random House. The chapters are peppered with fun name-dropping vignettes that may help you remember some of the tips. I rather enjoyed his 4 C’s: Convention, Consensus, Clarity and Comprehension. These are the reasons why house styles and guides exist. I have even dared to add two of my own – Concision and Consistency.
You can learn even more about the serial comma, why you should always use it, and not to use it before an ampersand (remember Eats, Shoots & Leaves?). I now know the difference between an em-dash and an en-dash.
He takes frequent swipes at the New Yorker’s house style, in particular, the use of the unwieldy dieresis (that umlaut type thing that denotes two syllables) on words like reëmerge and perhaps more usefully on naïve. For Dreyer, the best editing style is invisible.
My favourite chapter was “The Trimmables” where you will find very good examples of your spoken and written redundancies. There is a great list of his favourite web resources. My only complaint is that the small font size of the footnote symbols meant I often had to search for the text that prompted the hilarious and informative comments in the footnotes.
In fact, this is not an essential text as these conventions and rules are covered in other publications and web sites but the material is presented in a really fresh manner. Actually, I’m pretty happy I now own a copy.
*All the words in italics are know as “Wan Intensifiers and Throat Clearers” and they should be avoided.
Alistair MacLeod’s No Great Mischief is a multi-generational saga of an extended Cape Breton family sprinkled with Gaelic language and migrant history of the MacDonald clan. I was inspired to read it after reading an excerpt in a workshop on place and story and this year’s Federation of BC Writer’s annual meeting in Nanaimo. I’m preparing for an Autumn road trip to Cape Breton and maybe by then, I will have read Remembrance, his final story. No Great Mischief explores the agonies and rewards of family relationships, origins, belonging and the hardships of extreme poverty are explored in the majestically and magically evoked setting of Nova Scotia.
Anne Enright The Green Road. This story is a beautifully written story set in the Republic of Ireland. Four very different yet competitive siblings, Constance, Hanna, Emmet and Dan struggle with their independence from each other, their calling-in-life, their country but mostly their mother, Rosaleen.
Heather O’Neil Lonely Heart’s Hotel. While aware of Heather O’Neill Canada Reads 2007 winning novel, Lullabies for Little Criminals, I had never read any of her work. Her work has been short-listed twice for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and she is reading at the Denman Island Writer’s Festival so I thought I should “dig-in”.
The first two novels, LLC and The Girl who was Saturday Night are contemporary first-person narratives and referential to events from the author’s own story of growing up in Montreal in the Boulevard St. Laurent area. The Lonely Hearts Hotel is set in the Depression, written with an omniscient, third-person narrator and allows for more creativity by the author.
All three works are populated with the damaged, accidental and absent parents, dreamers, pimps, the pious, junkies and petty criminals who relentlessly and absurdly trespass on the “universally terrifying condition of childhood”. O’Neil frankly and skillfully addresses adolescent sexuality. Uncensored violent sexual encounters among the exploiters and the marginalized fill the pages.
Her work is pacey and peppered with surreal similes and metaphors. You have to like “like” to enjoy her style. The moon, pianos, roses, clowns, talking cats, top hats, distressed stuffed animals and delicate flying things – moths, dragonflies and butterflies recur throughout. The eternal search for love and home propels her resilient heroines, Baby, Nouschka and Rose as they seek “a hug from an adult where the adult does all the work.”
Survival by Margaret Atwood was written fifty years ago when she was in her thirties. I found a copy in a used book store in Ontario. Parts of it still stand up. The main thesis is that UK writing is thematically centralized by “Island”, American by “Frontier” and Canadian by “Survival.” The book has been roundly criticized by many but I found her to be realistic about the limitations of her readings and opinions in the early Seventies, particularly with respect to the near absence of First Nations literature.
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbach was my road trip audiobook. In light of the global migrant and immigrant crises, his writing may revive your empathy and compassion for these resilient fellow humans.
Spring by Scottish author Ali Smith is the third novel in her Seasons series. It has a complex three-part structure using first-person voices of the two main characters in a complex contracted timeline as they recount the same events from different POV. Florence is a magical young girl who refused to accept the status quo of migrant incarceration in contemporary Britain. This naturally led to me reading Autumn and Winter.
This is How You Lose Her is a collection of short stories by Juno Diaz featuring difficult relationships between men and women with many characters being recent Dominican immigrants.
Uncommon Type is a charming and well-written collection of short stories unified by Tom Hanks’ love and knowledge of vintage typewriters. Tom Hanks reads the audiobook. A delight.
Machines Like Me Ian McEwen. This is a tense examination of logical application of goodness and truth as interpreted by artificial intelligence pitted against the emotional micro-adjustments (actually more like macro-adjustments) made by humanity in the settings of violence, rape, greed and revenge. A thought-provoking page-turner.
When Will There be Good News? is another clever book by Kate Atkinson from 2008 I found on the shelves of a friend’s cabin and follows my Scottish writers’ theme. ( See Ali Smith above) It’s a weaving plot of converging mainly plausible co-incidences that involve a resourceful abandoned adolescent, a failed private eye, a GP who has survived childhood trauma and a questioning police constable. All have various developing degrees of insight and are working on second chances to find love, loyalty and honesty.
And then I have to say I lost interest in maintaining this comprehensive list and just kept reading but I thought it would be useful to curate what I have read and to offer to you the most compelling.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous. Ocean Vuong. This first novel is a provocative auto-fiction by a poet and bi-racial child of a Vietnamese immigrant. The first-person tale in the form of a letter to his mother describes the protagonist’s struggles with identity, sexuality, purpose and belonging. You can only be beautiful if you are seen.
The Heart Broke In. James Meek is a new author to me and a Scottish novelist who was a reporter for the Guardian. The Heart Broke In is a study in contemporary moral relativity among a quirky extended family. It is a libidinous tale written with wit and intelligence. I’m looking forward to reading his most recent book, a medieval historical fiction, To Calais In Ordinary Time that has been widely recommended as a Brexit parable.
The Sweetness in the Belly. Camilla Gibb wrote this book in 2006 and it was made into a movie this year. I finally got around to reading it. The review in the link is written by Booker Prize winner Bernadine Evaristo, author of her eighth novel, Girl, Women, Other. and who shared this year’s Booker with Margaret Atwood for her sensational The Testaments.
It is a combination of a love story, a travelogue of North and East Africa (particularly Ethiopia) and an homage to Islam as the main character is a white, British, Islamic female. Maybe I enjoyed it more because I am interested in aspects of Islam not commonly discussed or portrayed and also because I have travelled to Ethiopia. Regardless, it is a well-written tale of humanity and loyalty that crossed geographical, cultural and religious boundaries.
10 Minutes and 38 Seconds in This Strange World. This is a translation of Turkish-English author, Elif Shafak’s 11th novel. (that’s a lot of numbers in two sentences) You may be aware of or have read The Bastard of Istanbul. This novel is a violent insight into the descent of a young woman from rural Eastern Turkey into the fatal role of sex-worker in modern-day Istanbul.
The Nickel Boys. Colson Whitehead writes a wrenchingly violent story of a teenage black boy’s wrongful incarceration into a segregated reform school in Florida and his struggle to survive. The story is based on an actual institution, the Dozier School for boys. With a first-person narrator detailing each progressively more violent and dehumanizing event, the reader hopes beyond hope that Elwood will find his way out. There is an excruciatingly brutal twist at the end.
The Water Cure by Sophie MacKintosh was a Booker nominee in 2018. It is a brilliantly constructed dystopia examining loyalty among three sisters as they survive and resist ritualized abuse by their parents.
And that’s it, folks. Hope you have had a wonderful 2019 reading and wish you the same or better for 2020.