Books I read in 2015

2015 was not a banner year for reading for me. In retrospect, I should have embraced the way my reading patterns were looking early on (e-books versus paper) and adjusted accordingly. I didn't, and I ended up just reading a lot of mystery novels I'd already downloaded to my phone and not making much of a dent in my physical TBR pile. Oh well. Here is what I read by the numbers, following how I broke it down in 2014 and 2013. Not much comparative analysis is needed except to say that I read a lot less of everything. You can see what I read here on the 50 Book pledge page.

40 books

By genre

32 novels*
3 young adult
1 graphic novel
1 how-to guide
1 short-story collection
1 memoir
1 poetry collection

* 26 of the novels were straight-up mystery novels or thrillers....only six were what would usually be called literary novels.

By nation

7 Canada
2 Canada/U.S. (i.e. Canadians who live in the States, otherwise known as a distinction probably not worth making)
4 United States
3 U.K.
1 Japan

By gender

37 books by 14 women
3 books by 3 men

It turns out that almost all the books I read this year were in e-book format, either on my phone or on my Kobo. Only five of them were read on paper. This has got to be a new record for me in and of itself. But then again, this is the first year I've had an actual e-reader.

The books I flat-out enjoyed the most? Purity by Jonathan Franzen and Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel. The latter I picked up with some trepidation as for a number of years I've been working on a project prominently featuring a modern-day plague, and it is always nerve-wracking when another writer publishes something that seems as though it might be similar to your own work-in-progress. But apart from featuring a plague, the works are (of course) totally different and Station Eleven is a brilliant novel you should definitely pick up if you haven't already. (It is also on the Canada Reads longlist alongside Bone and Bread...cue squee. Station Eleven is so well imagined and the writing is so clean and the book just seems to contain so much in all the best ways. Purity by Franzen also shares all those qualities.)

But the book that had the greatest (in every sense) impact on my life? The wildly popular decluttering book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo. Really, I cannot say enough about this book. It has helped me get rid of bags and bags of stuff, and though I am still not anywhere close to finished, given how much stuff I started out with, it has helped me enormously and put me on the right path (I hope) to managing all the material goods that share my space.

Here's to a book-filled and even more decluttered 2016!

This is how we should all be reading

A big thank you to Corey Redekop for including Bone and Bread on his list of favourite reads of 2015 over at Speculating Canada! Looking at Corey's list, I am so inspired by the eclecticism of his choices -- it is clear that he reads a lot and he reads widely. There is fiction here across all genres: horror, sci-fi, literary, adventure, and others that sound like they truly defy categorization in the best possible ways. I think this is so important. Stories are stories and we all lose out by only reading in our comfortable little niches. Thank you so much for including the novel, Corey!

Bone and Bread is also on another list of note....the Canada Reads longlist!!!! I blogged at length about Canada Reads last year when it made it onto the longlist then ...a post you can read here. Not much has changed. I am still thrilled, flattered, hopeful, and so grateful for everything CBC Books does to promote our national literature. This year's theme is "Starting Over." Fingers crossed!

Books I read in 2014

The first thing you need to know is that I feel like a failure. I was ultra geared up and ready for year two of the 50 Book Pledge, and I didn't make it, mostly because my belated charge to the finish line --- armed with poetry collections and graphic novels --- was interrupted by the arrival of the baby in mid-November. Ah, well. I came close! 43 books in 2014. And it would be more if I counted all the Dickens and Austen rereads, or the reread of a bunch of Lois Lowry's Anastasia Krupnik series, after I found a bunch of them at the McGill Book Sale. Or if I hadn't abandoned quite so many books partway through...or gone travelling for three weeks in UK (awesome), instead of sitting around at home reading (typical). 

You can see what I read here. Or find me on Goodreads.

Here is the breakdown according to the same categories I assessed last year:

By genre*

22 novels

7 children's/YA

4 poetry collections

3 graphic novels

3 memoirs

3 non-fiction 

1 short story collection

Compared to last year, I read the exact same number of poetry collections and children's/YA (huh), and just one shy in memoir and graphic novels. I read three more short story collections last year, but then again I read a LOT of short stories in 2014 for the Room fiction contest and the Journey Prize jurying. Five fewer novels.

* Some of the books fall into more than one genre, e.g. a graphic novel that is also a YA book or a graphic novel that is also a memoir, but I've kept each book to one basic genre.

By nation

15 American 

9 Canadian 

3 English 

1 Scottish 

1 dual American-Canadian 

1 Australian

1 New Zealander

1 Nigerian

1 Dutch 

I think this must be the first year in my life where I did not read mainly CanLit! Interestingly, the same number of Americans as last year.

By gender

30 books by 25 women

13 books by 8 men

Highlights

The first two books I read in January, The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt and The Dinner by Herman Koch, remain among the most memorable reads of the year. I also really liked Americanah. 

The last two fiction titles I read in 2014,  The Opening Sky by Joan Thomas and The Freedom in American Songs by Kathleen Winter, were also outstanding. I have so much love and admiration for these women, so while I might technically be biased, I truly adored these books and you should still run out and buy them immediately. And as many of you might know, sometimes it is harder to be completely transported by the writing of someone you know...and I was. 

Also, the Susin Nielsen books are wonderful. Strongly recommended for the young people in your life, or just, you know, you. 

Lowlights

The Happiest Baby on the Block by Dr. Harvey Karp was thoughtfully gifted to me by a friend and it was full of useful information that I have already put to use...and I can definitely endorse the basic premise and techniques outlined in this book. However, I feel like it was written for morons, or at least people with some kind of hyper-amnesia, like the guy in Memento. It really sticks with that principle of "Tell them what you're going to say, say it, then tell them what you've said," but it adds in "say it seven more times." It would be a lot better if it were condensed into about twenty pages written for neurotypical readers, or maybe just a large infographic. I cannot express the annoyance of having a newborn baby and precious little reading time that I then spent trying to power through this repetitive book that kept trying to prove a premise I was already willing to accept merely by picking it up. (Fourth trimester, yo.) That being said, thanks, Dr. Karp, for your valuable techniques!

And I didn't really love any of the Divergent trilogy, but the last one, Allegiant, was especially annoying to me in the way it ended. 

Best Discovery?

Well, I had a very relaxed stretch of reading after I finally picked up a book by Alexander McCall Smith at the library. I ran through a bunch of his Edinburgh-set mystery series (the Isabel Dalhousie books), which made for excellent light pregnancy fare.   

Ten U2 songs that have stayed with me

In honour of today's exciting free U2 album release, I decided to skip ahead of all my half-written blog posts about book clubs and literary festivals and do an alternate version of the meme that has taken over Facebook lately. 

For the record, I don't think these are the ten best U2 songs. And some U2 songs meant a lot to me at the time, but I basically drove them into the ground through overplaying. I also haven't listened to the last two albums at all, although I've heard some of the songs when I last went to see them.

So...10 U2 songs that have stayed with me, in no particular order:

1. One

2. Electrical Storm

3. Red Hill Mining Town

4. Beautiful Day

5. New Year's Day

6. Dirty Day  (hmmm, notice a trend?)

7. One Tree Hill

8. Until the End of the World

9. A Sort of Homecoming

10. In A Little While

NYR check-in

How is everyone faring with their New Year’s Resolutions? It’s actually more than halfway through the year now (aughgh), but as good a time as any to take stock. (If you want to see my original post, full of hope and promise, it’s here.)

1) Finish one project and start another. I don’t know exactly what I even had in mind when I wrote ‘start another,’ since I’ve been midway through two projects for a while now. The ‘finish one project’ part is progressing, though it’ll still be a major challenge to wrap it up before the end of the year.

2) 100 blog posts. Hah!  Unless there is a strong uptick, I think I am bound to fail on this one.

3) Stop buying chips. Also a fail, mostly fueled by my desire to try novelty crisp flavours in Britain. (Cheese and onion! The perennial prawn cocktail! I even spotted haggis-flavoured crisps but managed to exercise near-superhuman restraint to avoid buying them.)

4) Take a photo every day. I’m  not sure at exactly what point I just completely forgot to do this, but it was in the spring and it was only after a week or so had gone by that I realized I had stopped, so there was no recovery possible. However, my manic vacation photo-taking has probably almost made up for this, quantity-wise, if nothing else.

So success is now riding completely on #1. Wish me luck. 

Now, as promised yesterday, here's a random vacation photo of the castle variety:

St. Andrew's Castle, Scotland

More Best of 2013

It was lovely to see a mention of Bone and Bread in Cult Montreal's Best Books of 2013!

There was a great review in Cult Montreal that I never got around around to mentioning back in the spring, as well as a little profile in the March print issue, which I'll post if I can track down my copy.

Cult Montreal is the free alt-weekly that has risen from the ashes of the former Montreal Mirror.  It is a labour of love and I love that it exists!   

on gratitude and anticipation

Today is my last day to finish up writing the acknowledgements for Bone and Bread, a task I've been postponing because how on earth can you thank everyone who helped you over a five-year period?!  

Short of listing the name of every single person I know, it's hard to think of how I'm going to avoid leaving somebody out.  There are the people who read pages. The people who listened.  The people who have been cheering me on all along.  The people who live far away but whose few emails a year I cherish dearly.  

....Okay, I've sent it.  And I hope that everyone in my life knows how much they have helped me, just through their friendship alone.

A couple of amazing things happened over the past week or so.  The Montreal Gazette featured me as one of the Stars to Watch in 2013 and also included Bone and Bread in a look ahead at anticipated books in 2013. Having my photo in the paper twice in the same day is pretty much guaranteed never to happen again, so I felt compelled to blurrily document it for posterity:
 

(I love these pictures of me...both taken at different times around my old apartment in Mile End.  Gazette photographers, in these cases John Kenney and Dave Sidaway, are really something.)

The Afterword (aka pretty much the best Canada national news outlet literary blog ever) also featured Bone and Bread as one of 13 most anticipated books of the first half of 2013.  Being listed alongside all of these amazing writers, including Andrew Pyper and especially Lisa Moore, was enough to make me almost, well, swoon. 

And Alexandra Yarrow, Ottawa librarian extraordinaire, mentioned it as an upcoming release she's looking forward to on her savvy blog Only Connect, too.  This international list has so many books I'm looking forward to, too, that it makes me blush (and, okay, grin) to see Bone and Bread there along with the new Kate Atkinson and Lionel Shriver novels.

AND...Bone and Bread was also included in illustrious company in this spring preview list of "the books we're waiting for" at the 49th Shelf (aka essential CanLit central).  This list in particular includes a number of new-to-me authors and titles I'll be adding to my to-read list.

I should say that I'm sure at least part of the reason it has made these online lists is because of the striking cover, so thank you to Alysia Shewchuk for her design (I found out who it was!) and because of Anansi's stellar reputation in publishing really excellent books.  I'm so lucky my novel found a home there.

One of the nicest things about all this is that it lets me share what is so often a hidden or invisible process.  I'm finally finishing this big, exciting project (which is thrilling for me simply for being done, even if nobody buys it or reads it or likes it), and it's so lovely to have these little signposts out in the world that say, I'm a writer!  Really, I am!  And this is what I've been doing!  A number of people who know me only through my day job have been sending kind notes or coming up to me to say they heard about my book in the newspaper and asking when they can buy a copy.  
  
And besides all of that wonderful advance notice of the book last week, as if it wasn't enough to put me over the moon, I also received a wonderful email from a writer whose opinion I value very much, who had some very kind things to say about the novel, including the sort of things that made me feel as though she understood exactly what I was trying to do.  It's the kind of email that makes me feel like even if nobody else likes it, I won't mind all that much.  This is the second such email I've received (almost nobody I know has read it!), and it means more to me that I can properly express here.

So it was a wonderful week for writing excitement, and I'm glad that it coincided with the finish line (I think!) of the process.   Now back to regularly scheduled programming.  (That is...more writing?) 

Things We Like

Building on Rebecca's list over at Rose-Coloured, to try to get to 1000.  (If you want to add to this list, leave a comment or a link over at the original post at Rose-Coloured.) 

Whistling in chorus with somebody else

Allongés with milk

Making lists

Bouncy castles

Cream cheese icing

DIY nail art

Bunting banners

Earl Grey green tea

Girls on HBO

Radiolab

Lime and juniper berry doughnuts from Cafe Sardine

Finally getting rid of clothes that don’t fit properly

Learning how to purl

Chocolate with sea salt

Red shoes

Voting

Cakes decorated with fresh flowers

LUSH Gorilla perfume solid scents

Joanna Newsom

Kir Royales

Mark Bittman’s bean burgers

Vinyl

Headphone jack splitters

Ataulfo mangoes

Margaret Atwood on Twitter

Save-the-Date bookmarks from my wedding in all the books I’m reading

managing expectations

The thing about Mondays seems to be managing one’s expectations. There is the thrill of upcoming plans (tonight: music and loved ones, tomorrow: drinks with a friend I haven’t seen in much too long, Wednesday: more music), the slight anxiety of conflicting commitments (two things scheduled for Saturday! Possibly at the same time! One in a far-flung corner of the city I’ve never been to before…), the looming freelance deadline square in the middle of the week when there is almost no time free to prepare for it, the allocation of lunchtime plans to exercise or errands or social calls (in this case, lunchtimes are given over to a dear friend recovering in the hospital across the street), the overly ambitious to-do lists that include pressing matters (the now-monthly and increasingly dreaded and despair-filled call to Bell to get them to adjust my service and billing as originally requested back in September) as well as items that have continued to roll over for weeks (make dentist and doctor appointments), along with all the regular stuff like buying groceries and making meals and doing the dishes and managing to get out of the door wearing two socks without holes in them (this last is only very occasionally achieved). Then there’s emails and texts and chats with friends. Then there’s worry and longing for people not seen in much too long, not to mention guilt over all those other ancient items on the to-do list that never quite make it onto the week’s menu.

And then there’s the writing. When to do that? Sigh.

If I expected to do it all, I’d be crushed by disappointment on a daily basis. But if I expect nothing, I achieve even less. All the writers out there with even busier lives (e.g. kids…gulp): I don’t know how you do it!

Taking stock on old resoutions

I was going to take stock of how well I achieved my 2011 New Year’s Resolutions, but then I saw that the last ones I posted were at the beginning of 2010. I also saw that I only posted three times in all of 2011…clearly a resolution waiting to happen right there.

So I’ve had two years to work on these goals:

Read more American fiction

I did this, a little, though less than I would have liked. (Then again, I would prefer to have read more of everything, in every category.) I read The Corrections (yes, finally), A Visit From the Goon Squad (really amazing), We Need To Talk About Kevin (really good…very curious to see the movie, especially as Tilda Swinton seems like perfect casting), Home (tremendous), The Human Stain (the only Philip Roth I’d read before was Portnoy’s Complaint…my, what I’ve been missing), and Mr. Peanut (a totally dark and amazingly clever novel about marriage and murder). This last one was recommended to me by another amazing American writer, Joanna Pearson, whose novel The Rites and Wrongs of Janice Wills is the perfect YA treat. (YA = Young Adult, for those of you who don’t occasionally take great pleasure in dipping into what’s available for the younger set.)

Read more British fiction Unless you count rereading Villette, the only British novel I’m sure I’ve read is The Little Stranger. It’s a great story – I got spooked reading it – and it was the perfect companion piece to Downton Abbey, which I got swept up in last January. Oh no, wait! At some point I also read Skippy Dies (solid, enjoyable).

Read more poetry Yes, I absolutely did! Not only did I read a fair bit from the library, but I'm also fortunate enough to know a number of amazing poets who've published books recently. I promise you will not be disappointed by any of the following: Hypotheticals by Leigh Kotsilidis, The Id Kid by Linda Besner, A Complete Encyclopedia of Different Types of People by Gabe Foreman, and All This Could Be Yours by Joshua Trotter. Now I just need people to do this all the time and I'll be totally covered on the poetry front.

Finish my novel Well, what does finish really mean? I finished and submitted the initial draft I’m sure I was referring to here. And then another. And…one more? And now I’m waiting for notes. That’s about as much as I feel like saying about this right now.

Write another one Hahaha, it is to laugh. Well, not really. I have two other serious projects underway, and a few other less ambitious things somewhat started/imagined/idly planned. But a lot of major work needs to happen before this gets crossed off the to-do list. 

Try writing something in another genre Yes! A little. Though I haven’t tried submitting anything yet.

Conclusion: Decent progress? Unless you consider the fact that I had two years to work on these. (Secondary conclusion: time to make some new goals.)

Happy New Year

I'm not a huge fan of celebrating the new year in the dead of winter (here in Winnipeg, where I am right now, it's a crisp -31), but I am a big believer in new beginnings and for that reason alone it seems like a worthwhile holiday. I haven't written down any resolutions this year yet (but I should...apparently people who write down their goals are more likely, statistically, to achieve them), but I've been working on a 101 Things in 1001 Days for a while now, and my ongoing writing- and reading-related goals look something like this:

- read more American fiction
- read more British fiction
- read more poetry
- finish my novel (so close right now!)
- write another one
- try writing something in another genre (essay, poetry, etc)

In case it's not obvious from my to-do list, I mostly read contemporary Canadian fiction, and I don't plan on stopping. I've made some progress with this list (let's see, I read Netherland last year...and...uh...), but not enough that I feel I can stop making a special effort yet. If you have any recommendations for British and American writers I should be reading, I'd love to hear them.

Here's hoping that 2010 sees us reaching all our reading and writing goals!