Early January, in that sweet cushion of time between post-holiday festivities and pre-back to work, has become a time I relish for contemplating my year past in reading and for absorbing and appreciating the musings of fellow readers as they share their own reflections. Interestingly, I find myself leaping/flipping/scrolling past the “best of” lists and instead gravitating more and more to the reflections about reading as exploration, revelation, often deliciously meandering journey, shared experience, opportunity to bust out of staid categories and forge new ones … and more.
Those who read steadily and think about reading inspire me, including Shawna Lemay, Kerry Clare, Tanis MacDonald (who, if you’re fortunate to be connected to her on Facebook, has done some mighty category-busting this year). Those who gather to share with delight and fervor their varied reading experiences, such as the generous attendees at two different silent book club gatherings I attended regularly this year, bring my reading enthusiasm and devotion to new levels every month.
Reading is not a competitive sport, but that doesn’t stop me from challenging myself (and, I hope not intimidatingly, others at times) … and this turned out to be a banner year, particularly after the struggles with which I contended in 2018. I read the most books ever in a year since I’ve been keeping track – 65 – and I came this close to considering posting a “10 best” list this year because some of the reading was that good. But I reminded myself that sometimes the setting and circumstances and company and more around each particular read often elevated what I was reading, and it’s those experiences I want to celebrate and strive to have more of in future.
In addition to my year’s reading list, I continued my commitment in 2019 to a daily devotion to at least one poem … and usually more, as friends on Twitter continued to generously share their poem choices and reflections via the #todayspoem hashtag. I’m now heading into my ninth uninterrupted year (that’s right, I have not missed a single day) of poetry tweets.
Another practice that heightens my weekly reading joy as I navigate through books is that of #sundaysentence, tirelessly championed and curated by author David Abrams. As I observed last year, seeking a weekly gem seems to sharpen my attention when I’m reading, and I love discovering new works through the #sundaysentence choices of other readers.
Last year, my husband arranged for my then 35-year-old book of books (in which I’ve recorded my reading since I graduated from university in 1983) to be beautifully rebound, by bookbinder Don Taylor. Now 36 years old, it is still the place I go to first to record my continued adventures in reading.
Here are the books I read and read aloud in 2019, with a few recollections of where I was when I was reading them.
- Milkman
Anna Burns
2018 - Years, Months, and Days
Amanda Jernigan
2018 - Voodoo Hypothesis
Canisia Lubrin
2017 - Machine Without Horses
Helen Humphreys
2018 - OBITS.
tess liem
2018 - The Emissary
Yoko Tawada, translated by Margaret Mitsutani
2018 - The Long Take
Robin Robertson
2018 - City Poems
Joe Fiorito
2018 - Reproduction
Ian Williams
2019 - Wuthering Heights
Emily Bronte
1847
(read aloud) - Indecency
Justin Phillip Reed
2018 - Can You Ever Forgive Me? Memoirs of a Literary Forger
Lee Israel
2008 - Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk
Kathleen Rooney
2017 - Nirliit
Juliana Leveille-Trudel, translated by Anita Anand
2018 - Human Hours
Catherine Barnett
2018 - Living Up To a Legend
Diana Bishop
2017
(read aloud) - The Quaker
Liam McIlvanney
2018 - The Organist – Fugues, Fatherhood and a Fragile Mind
Mark Abley
2019 - Wonderland
Matthew Dickman
2018 - Gingerbread
Helen Oyeyemi
2019 - These are not the potatoes of my youth
Matthew Walsh
2019 - Quarrels
Eve Joseph
2018 - Belonging – A German Reckons with History and Home
Nora Krug
2018 - No Bones
Anna Burns
2001 - The Perseverance
Raymond Antrobus
2018 - Women Talking
Miriam Toews
2018 - Girl of the Southern Sea
Michelle Kadarusman
2019 - Watching You Without Me
Lynn Coady
2019 - Normal People
Sally Rooney
2018 - The Art of Dying
Sarah Tolmie
2018 - There Are Not Enough Sad Songs
Marita Dachsel
2019 - Most of What Follows is True
Michael Crummey
2019 - On Looking – Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes
Alexandra Horowitz
2013
(read aloud) - Heave
Christy Ann Conlin
2002 - Into That Fire
MJ Cates
2019 - The Teardown
by David Homel
2019 - Watermark
Christy Ann Conlin
2019 - Casting Deep Shade
C.D. Wright
2019 - The Flamethrowers
Rachel Kushner
2013 - Broke City
Wendy McGrath
2019 - The Nickel Boys
Colson Whitehead
2019 - The Mars Room
Rachel Kushner
2018 - House Divided – How the Missing Middle Will Solve Toronto’s Affordability Crisis
edited by John Lorinc, Alex Bozikovic, Cheryll Case and Annabel Vaughan
2019 - Late Breaking
K.D. Miller
2018 - The Caiplie Caves
Karen Solie
2019 - Mister Sandman
Barbara Gowdy
1996 - The Innocents
Michael Crummey
2019 - Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
2018 - A Choosing – Selected Poems
Liz Lochhead
2011 - Hologram
P.K. Page
1994 - Deaf Republic
Ilya Kaminsky
2019 - In My Own Moccasins – A Memoir of Resilience
Helen Knott
2019 - Say Nothing – A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland
Patrick Radden Keefe
2019
(read aloud) - Ducks, Newburyport
Lucy Ellmann
2019 - Mobile
Tanis MacDonald
2019 - I Am Sovereign
Nicola Barker
2019 - The Man Who Saw Everything
Deborah Levy
2019 - Renaissance Normcore
Adele Barclay
2019 - My Father, Fortune-tellers & Me
Eufemia Fantetti
2019 - Night Boat to Tangier
Kevin Barry
2019 - Good to a Fault
Marina Endicott
2008 - Crow Gulch
Douglas Walbourne-Gough
2019 - Something to Write Home About
Seamus Heaney
1998 - Alias Grace
Margaret Atwood
1996 - Worry
Jessica Westhead
2019
“Knowledge didn’t guarantee power, safety and relief and often for some it meant the opposite of power, safety and relief – leaving no outlet for dispersal either, of all the heightened stimuli that had been built by being up on in the first place. Purposely not wanting to know therefore, was exactly what my reading-while-walking was about.”
I so enjoyed getting lost in the feisty and singular voice of reading-while-walking maybe-girlfriend middle sister in Anna Burns’ Milkman. This book was a steady companion for the first couple of weeks of the year, at home, on transit and at silent book club.
"That I
who is
but clay
should feel
such joy."#todayspoem I – Years by Amanda Jernigan from Years, Months, and Days (2018 @biblioasis) https://t.co/KvNOBj6fAr pic.twitter.com/aTETngxyNJ— Vicki Ziegler (@bookgaga) January 17, 2019
"Instead the sun comes up announcing it has touched the parts of us that hurt,
the parts we swath in children's clothes, that name
the armfuls of us still earthbound."#todayspoem The Frankenstein Universe by Canisia Lubrin @canisialu from Voodoo Hypothesis (2017 @wolsakandwynn) pic.twitter.com/RppVGxmSD9— Vicki Ziegler (@bookgaga) January 3, 2019
I remember reading this at home in a fairly swift and gorgeous swoosh. Helen Humphreys is consistently masterful at creating lush prose around sometimes unlikely subjects, this time the imagined life and thoughts of real life salmon-fly dresser, Megan Boyd, a craftswoman who worked for sixty years out of a bare-bones cottage in a small village in the north of Scotland. That remote cottage was visited by Prince Charles, an avid user of her uniquely crafted flies who made the trip there to present her with the British Empire Medal.
"Show us the bodies.
Tell us their names.I love you obits. when you
disappear you're easier to miss."
#todayspoem Obit. by tess liem (@EastMiles) from OBITS. (2018 @coachhousebooks) pic.twitter.com/RT45rHs4aa— Vicki Ziegler (@bookgaga) January 13, 2019
“He walks. That is his name and nature. / Rows of buildings, all alike, / doors and windows, people going in, looking out; / inside – halls and stairs, halls and stairs, / and more doors, opening and closing.”
Robin Robertson’s The Long Take is a singular and hypnotic blend of poetry and prose, sometimes starting as one and ending as the other in one paragraph, sentence or phrase.
From the very, very cold January night when Ian Williams launched his debut novel to a very cold night in November at the end of the Canadian literature awards season, it was a pleasure to cheer on Reproduction. The book is challenging in its experimental approach to how language on the page can evolve – clearly drawing on the poetry foundation of Williams’ oeuvre – and its cast of characters is thorny, but diligent readers are rewarded for giving this book full and concentrated attention.
Yes, dear readers, we read Wuthering Heights aloud … and its tempestuous plot and characters and often exquisitely overwrought prose made it a surprisingly entertaining experience from beginning to end. As the likes of Meghan Cox Gurdon contend – and my husband and I have known and appreciated for years – “Storytime isn’t just for young children”.
In rapid succession, I read the book and then we saw the movie, where Lee Israel is portrayed unforgettably by Melissa McCarthy. Book and movie are an unusually well-matched pair of interpretations of an intriguing bookish tale and singular character.
Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk made the rounds as a popular choice of our silent book club.
This collection of sometimes rueful but always very grounded poems about everyday human frailties and foibles was one of my favourite poetry reads of the past year.
“I get so worried when I see space news. I heard astronauts
incinerate their underwear and the ash falls to Earth.”
Couch potato by Matthew Walsh from These are not the potatoes of my youth
Indisputably my favourite title of the year, this was also one of my favourite poetry reads of 2019.
This haunting prose poetry collection won the 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize.
This book presents an intriguing approach to a non-fiction/memoir piece tackling troubling subject matter. Nora Krug uses a beautifully realized illustrated / graphic novel format to confront her family’s wartime past in Nazi Germany. I came to this book by way of a trusted recommendation from a silent book club friend.
This early Anna Burns novel was also recommended to me by the silent book club friend from whom I learned about Nora Krug’s Belonging – A German Reckons with History and Home. It was interesting to see Anna Burns building her craft to what culminates so exquisitely in Milkman.
The Perseverance by Raymond Antrobus – moving, fierce, unforgettable – garnered awards and attention galore in 2019, particularly astonishing and gratifying for a debut collection. How wonderful that the work was shortlisted for the 2019 Griffin Poetry Prize, which means we got to see and capture a powerful presentation of his poems:
“You’ll know when the Queen of the Sea is here because she calms the waters and the clouds gather overhead.”
I enjoyed Michelle Kadarusman’s gorgeous middle grade novel Girl of the Southern Sea myself before giving it to a young friend. The book was a highly deserving finalist for the 2019 Governor General’s Literary Awards in the category of Young People’s Literature.
This book is astoundingly well-crafted, a perfect balance of contemporary family drama, intriguing and cautionary character study and flat-out pageturner suspense thriller. Lynn Coady has created something singular, giving us food for thought about how we care for each other and how life evolves and sometimes changes abruptly and demands that we cope – all while mining our deepest fears yet never losing sight of the value of human compassion and resilience.
“This is of course why love exists.
Love, that coping mechanism
That lets you live while something isn’t
Wholly satisfactory.”
56 by Sarah Tolmie from The Art of Dying
These sly, feisty, sometimes disarmingly vulnerable poems are packaged within my favourite bookcover of the year.
“Tell me, as we take in this splendour,
have we run out of firsts – the ones that glow,
that bring joy? Old friend, please say no.”
now is the season of open windows by Marita Dachsel from There Are Not Enough Sad Songs
"Tell me, as we take in this splendour,
have we run out of firsts – the ones that glow,
that bring joy? Old friend, please say no."#todayspoem now is the season of open windows by @MaritaDachsel from There Are Not Enough Sad Songs (2019 @UAlbertaPress) pic.twitter.com/lEOzybjRuX— Vicki Ziegler (@bookgaga) June 4, 2019
Anything by Alexandra Horowitz is read-aloud friendly, in our experience.
Having just read Heave (again, another spot-on recommendation from a silent book club friend), it was a particular treat to then get an advance copy of Christy Ann Conlin’s riveting short story collection Watermark, in which one of the stories is a variation on the startling opening sequence of Heave (which, by the way, was written 17 years earlier).
Our annual cottage weekend with friends includes an evening of readings, for which I selected the Flannery O’Connor-esque story “Full Bleed” – whoa.
“For healing, esp asthma in a child: core out a hole in trunk, put lock of asthmatic’s hair in hole. Plug hole. When child has reached height of hole, asthma will be all gone.”
from Casting Deep Shade by C.D. Wright
At its very simplest a meditation on the power and presence of trees, C.D. Wright’s posthumously published Casting Deep Shade is a treasure with which to spend concentrated and devoted time as it runs the emotional and intellectual gamut and takes you through poetry, prose, folklore, technical and scientific discourse, history and much more.
The stories in this collection gain additional resonance as each one is associated with an Alex Colville painting.
“it’s no crime to resemble discarded inventory
not a crime to regard others
with what appears to be only basic species recognition”
An Unexpected Encounter with He Who Has Been Left Alone to His Perils by Karen Solie from The Caiplie Caves
"it's no crime to resemble discarded inventory
not a crime to regard others
with what appears to be only basic species recognition"#todayspoem An Unexpected Encounter with He Who Has Been Left Alone to His Perils by Karen Solie from The Caiplie Caves (2019 @HouseofAnansi) pic.twitter.com/FLKDRoxWPL— Vicki Ziegler (@bookgaga) August 22, 2019
Spirited Janina is one of my favourite characters tromping determinedly out of the pages of another one of this year’s reading highlights. And again, it seems it was a great year for titles, too … this one stirs my blood!
This collection was a thoughtful gift from a silent book club friend.
So thrilled to find this treasure in a used bookstore …
“Air empties, but for the squeak of strings and the tap tap of wooden fists against the walls.”
And Yet, on Some Nights by Ilya Kaminsky from Deaf Republic
Unnerving, astounding, incredibly moving …
Patrick Radden Keefe has crafted an absorbing and compelling combination detective story and oral history out of one of the most heartrending of the unsolved murders during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. This was absolutely amazing to read aloud, too.
Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann was not only the reading experience of the year for me, but it will remain as one of the most indelible of my life as a reader, I predict. The 1,000-page one-sentence tome capturing the rambling thoughts of a nervous pie-making mother and homemaker in contemporary Ohio could be dismissed and avoided on so many grounds, perhaps, but it is not to be missed. As she runs the gamut from recipes and grocery lists to concerns for her four children, love for her second husband, memories of her mother and other family members, anger and fear at the state of her home and nation under the odious shadow of Trump … and more … and more … and more … her voice doesn’t just remain in your head, it sinks into you at a cellular level. How her life seemingly inexplicably intertwines with that of a mountain lion tirelessly seeking the children that have been taken away from her turns the last pages of the book into a suspenseful ride that is almost unbearable … but by then, you simultaneously do not want it to end.
Even with its heft and awkwardness, I couldn’t help taking it everywhere with me … which means I’ll associate it with reading on the subway, in bed, at the cottage, at the blood donor clinic … and being utterly absorbed and entranced, no matter where I was.
“By the Don, beneath the bridge, gargoyles brought to earth, scale-model dragons and angels of revisionist history, beasts of Bay Street brought low and eye to eye with ideology and staghorn sumac …” Jane and the Monsters for Beauty, Permanence, and Individuality by Tanis MacDonald from Mobile
Who better than a poet to orchestrate uncommon magic on a gray Saturday morning in the heart of noisy #Toronto? Read the whole story here.
A new Nicola Barker is always cause for celebration, at least by this reader. This novella is signature Barker brilliance, and another step in her experimentation with breaking down the walls between characters, reader and writer. Utterly fascinating!
This captures, by the way, one of my favourite places and times of the day to read – breakfast on a working weekday, after I’ve done my initial check-in for email and work-related social media updates and have my working day mapped out.
Deborah Levy’s interview with Eleanor Wachtel in November at Revival Bar was peculiar and strangely recalcitrant, but Wachtel’s team ably edited it for broadcast. I love Levy’s work, so I tried to block out the odd interview behaviour as I read The Man Who Saw Everything and enjoyed it immensely. It’s the sort of book that I suspect I will go back to and glean different gems of insight with each reread.
Kevin Barry offered a lively reading and generous insights to interviewer Charles Foran at the Toronto Public Library in September, still fresh in my mind when I read and was utterly enthralled with the book in November.
One of three rereads this year, Marina Endicott’s Good to a Fault has been calling to me for a while, and I’m so glad I heeded the call. This was a wonderful, affecting revisit.
“All this hard living just to stay alive.
Nice to escape, though. This feather bed.
Dream up whatever life you want.”
Escape by Douglas Walbourne-Gough from Crow Gulch
"All this hard living just to stay alive.
Nice to escape, though. This feather bed.
Dream up whatever life you want."#todayspoem Escape by Douglas Walbourne-Gough from Crow Gulch (2019 @goose_lane) pic.twitter.com/6PyXVNwiN7— Vicki Ziegler (@bookgaga) November 8, 2019
Such a lovely Christmas present …
Spent some lovely time this afternoon reading the Something to Write Home About script in conjunction with this screening and talk (including info on the Seamus Heaney HomePlace @SHHomePlace) @JaipurLitFest in 2018: https://t.co/AZ1tGoBpGj
— Vicki Ziegler (@bookgaga) December 27, 2019
Another of three rereads this year, a final silent book club meeting during the holiday season helped me to finish this hefty but absorbing read. I was inspired to reread it after binge watching the superbly realized mini-series of the book. The first time I read this book (the book was published in 1996 and I first read it in 2003), Margaret Atwood’s voice was the narrator in my head. This time, Sarah Gadon as Grace was the voice.
In 2019, I read a total of 65 works, a considerable leap from my challenging 2018 reading year:
- 33 works of fiction (novels and short story collections) – the exact same as my 2018 total
- 21 poetry collections and
- 11 works of non-fiction.
I reread 3 books, read 3 works in translation, read one graphic work (interestingly, not a novel but non-fiction) and read 36 works by Canadian authors (again, surprisingly, the exact same as my 2018 total). My husband and I read 3 books aloud to each other this year and have another one in progress as we greet the new year.
I also kept track again this year of the publication dates of the books I read. In 2019, the oldest book I read was published in 1847 (Wuthering Heights, which was also a read-aloud book and, oh my, quite the rereading experience), and I also read a number of books published in the 1990s, further fulfilling last year’s intention to read or reread some more older books (a yearly practice I intend to keep up). More than half of the books I read this year were published in 2018 or 2019.
Currently in progress, heading into 2020:
-
Grand Union
by Zadie Smith -
Arias
by Sharon Olds -
I’ll Take You There: Mavis Staples, the Staple Singers, and the March up Freedom’s Highway
by Greg Kot
(reading aloud, with gusto!)
For yet another year, I’m looking back fondly and with great satisfaction on my 2019 reading and looking forward eagerly to where my 2020 reading will take me. I’m grateful to the writers, publishers, reviewers and fellow readers who have spurred on and broadened my reading. I’m thankful for the bounty of beautiful words that came to me via so many conduits, evoking such an array of ideas, trains of thought, memories and associations, providing so much off the page, too, from solace and companionship to challenges and even healthy discontent.
I’ll simply conclude (as I always do) …
It’s not how many you read that counts. It’s that you read that counts.
Richard Harrison’s wise and approachable poetry collection On Not Losing My Father’s Ashes in the Flood has the satisfying cohesiveness of linked short stories. His meditations on mortality are grounded in rueful realities, from the collection’s titular tragicomedy to the telling observations of lovers, children and even golfing partners. Those meditations become transcendent as and because they take the body as their humble starting point, as in the poignant “With the Dying of the Light”:
