reading notes

Reading Round-Up: February 2023

/ Christine Pennylegion

It’s spring! The dwarf irises are blooming in my garden (always the first flowers up, by a considerable margin) and it’s well past time to take a look at what I read last month. February was particularly fruitful, I felt, in part because I’ve hit on a reading mode that really works for me: nonfiction books on paper, and fiction on my phone. I love the portability of ebooks and the ease of borrowing them — instantaneously! — from my local library. But for some reason that I haven’t bothered to parse, on-screen reading doesn’t seem as suitable for nonfiction texts, at least for me. Maybe it’s because I approach the text differently if I can hold it in my hands; maybe it’s just nice to differentiate long-form nonfiction from the constant stream of emails, blog posts, and articles I’m already reading on my laptop or phone screen. Whatever the reason, this method of separation seems to work.

Here’s what I read last month:

  • A Single Thread (Tracy Chevalier)
  • Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law (Mary Roach)
  • At the Edge of the Orchard (Tracy Chevalier)
  • Several People are Typing (Calvin Kasulke)
  • The Long Haul (Finn Murphy)
  • Dear Mr Knightley (Katherine Reay)
  • The Man with Two Left Feet and Other Stories (P. G. Wodehouse)
  • Draft No. 4 (John McPhee)
  • Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
  • My Salinger Year (Joanna Rakoff)
  • Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen)
  • So You Want to be a Wizard (Diane Duane)
  • Deep Wizardry (Diane Duane)
  • High Wizardry (Diane Duane)
  • A Wizard Abroad (Diane Duane)
  • The God of the Garden (Andrew Peterson)

Let’s do the fiction first.

I read Tracy Chevalier’s Girl with a Pearl Earring a few times about a million years ago, back when everyone was reading it, but hadn’t at all kept up with her work after that. Both A Single Thread and At the Edge of the Orchard are historical novels: the former examines the lives of the “surplus women” of Britain’s post-WW1 demographic crisis; the latter, American expansion to the West in the early/mid-19th century. They’re both immersive and richly detailed; I enjoyed learning about cathedral embroidery (what we would probably call needlepoint now) and the British gardening craze for exotic American trees like California’s giant redwoods. At the Edge of the Orchard used a number of dialect variations to differentiate between point-of-view characters, which I found somewhat distracting the first time it shifted but worked well overall. I will note, however, that (as with Girl with a Pearl Earring), attempted and/or actualized rape was used as a plot point in both novels, which, at this point, just seems lazy.

From the historical we move to the extremely contemporary, with Calvin Kasulke’s delightful, absolutely bonkers Several People are Typing, an absurdist novella told entirely through workplace Slack conversations. It was blurbed as “where WFH meets WTF,” which strikes me as entirely accurate — and includes some literary Easter eggs if you’re paying attention (watch for how Kasulke uses excerpts from Yeat’s “The Second Coming”). I read this in a single evening when I had been feeling extremely blue about something — I don’t even remember what — and it was just the ticket. It’s bananas.

One of the advantages of keeping a reading log is that when you’ve read something previously, or think you have, you can actually go back and look for it. The first time I read Dear Mr Knightley was in the summer of 2014; I was massively pregnant with Anselm and house-sitting for one of our professors, on whose shelves I found a copy. That’s long enough to have forgotten everything about it except a general positive impression. Dear Mr Knightley is epistolary almost in its entirety, following former foster-kid Samantha Moore, who deals with her trauma by sublimating herself in 19th-century novels, particularly the Austen oeuvre. She is granted an anonymous scholarship to a prestigious graduate journalism program, on the condition that she writes letters to her benefactor, keeping “Mr Knightley” informed as to her progress. It’s a sweet narrative despite Sam’s inherent, um, annoyingness. As with many romances it’s necessary to consciously suspend some disbelief, but in the end Sam finds a forever-family as well as a love interest (the former is admittedly more satisfying), and all’s well that ends well.

Speaking of Austen — skipping Wodehouse for the moment — last month I finished both Pride and Prejudice (for like the 30th time, and as an audio version in this case) and Sense and Sensibility. Reading the latter was a very strange experience. I was sure I had read it at some point, perhaps as a teenager, but as I went on I realized I had no idea where the plot was going, except I could remember some things, or thought I remembered them — I think I must have seen the movie, or bits of it, and that combined with a general sense of what happens that I’ve just picked up here and there somehow convinced my brain that I had read this novel. Reader, I had not. And I probably won’t again because, whew, it could definitely stand to be chopped down by a good 50-80 pages… also I hated everyone but Elinor, who marries (imho) the wrong man at the end, anyway. I was profoundly disappointed that when Austen afflicted Maryanne with fever she did not take the obvious opportunity to kill her off, and really, the whole lot of them ought to go jump in a lake. Perhaps Sense and Sensibility would not have disappointed me so much had I not been reading it right at the time I was finishing up listening to Pride and Prejudice, which is such a sparkling delight; the comparison was not flattering. (It’s odd that they’re so different in quality, too, because they were published less than two years apart, and Austen seems to have been revising them both around the same time.)

The Man with Two Left Feet and Other Stories is a wonderful collection. Wodehouse is best known for the Jeeves and Wooster novels, but he wrote short stories as well, all of them with his trademark wit and humour. I especially enjoyed the two stories told from a dog’s perspective, although I cannot just now remember their titles.

Finally, wonderfully, engrossingly: the first four installments in Diane Duane’s Young Wizards series of young adult fantasy novels. I just tore through these! In the first one, So You Want to Be a Wizard, young teenager Nita is drawn to a mysterious book of the same title on the shelves of her local library, and finds herself drawn into a world of magic, powered by the Speech that holds the universe(s) together, where wizards unite in the fight against entropy and its champion, the Lone Power. It’s terrific stuff, and though Duane’s books aren’t religious per se, and she draws from many different mythologies, there’s a lot of really interesting theological things going on in the underpinnings if you’re willing to look for them. The only real caveat is the series timeline, which is woefully complex and contradictory, due in part to the span of time over which they were published. In the second book, A Wizard of Mars, Nita’s younger sister Dairine gets a top-of-the-line home computer that is essentially a lightly-disguised Apple II; only a few books later, they all have cell phones and ipods (and Dairine, notoriously, has aged a few years backwards). If you’re willing to accept that the books are set in some sort of “eternal now” — rather like comic strips, I suppose — then it works, but once I noticed the discrepancies I found it them hard to overlook.

On to the non-fiction!

Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law is another one of Mary Roach’s fascinating, one-word-titled (Bonk, Stiff, Spook, Gulp, Grunt), long-form explorations of unusual topics — in this case, the conflicts, legal and otherwise, between humanity and the animal kingdom. It’s absolutely typical Roach: engaging, funny, and full of weird facts I never knew I needed to know.

The Long Haul is Finn Murphy’s memoir, centred on his life as a long-haul trucker; more specifically, as a cross-country professional movers. We hired movers for our second-to-last uprooting (a ten+ hour drive and across an international border) and it was a very interesting experience; kind of weird to have other people doing so much with our stuff, and of course requiring a great deal of trust as they took off with it once all of the packing was finished. I found Murphy’s narrative fascinating; it’s always cool to get an insider’s-eye-view of an industry. People! Doing things! My friends, the world is infinitely fascinating.

Also on the memoir menu, I read Joanna Rakoff’s My Salinger Year, her account of a year spent working at a NYC literary agency of some prominence during the mid-1990s. Rakoff is older than I am, but not by so much that I didn’t resonate with many of her cultural touchstones. The book is revealing — of an agency struggling against modernization (her boss grudgingly allowed one computer to be purchased for the entire office, which had to be used in a public place), of the ways the ways that we bend ourselves to try and fit a mold we think we want or need, of Rakoff’s own coming of age. It was highly engrossing. (You can figure out which agency she worked for with an internet search or two; I wonder what they thought of it?)

John McPhee’s Draft No. 4 is partly a memoir, I suppose, although it’s really about writing and a life spent doing just that. McPhee writes long-form nonfiction — articles that come in at 40 or 50 thousand words — and I found his remarks about structure to be especially illuminating. The whole thing is just chok-full of tidbits, really, and obviously written by a master of his craft. This was a library copy but I plan to purchase my own.

Finally, I closed out the month with Andrew Peterson’s beautiful The God of the Garden. Peterson seems to do a bit of everything: he writes both fiction and nonfiction, he sings, he founded an artists’ community… The God of the Garden is a meandering memoir written over the lockdown year of 2020, about faith, gardening, creativity, place and rootedness, theology, and the wonder of trees. (I too often wonder at trees.) It was beautiful, and made me more eager than ever to get my hands in the dirt again this spring.

Bodily work

/ Christine Pennylegion

All three kids are coughing today, which meant no church for us; coupled with their long sleeps engendered by the time change, this left me with an unexpected chunk of unscheduled time this morning. I decided to pull out my sewing machine. We bought new curtains for our dining room and den — oh, months and months ago, maybe more than a year at this point. They look great but are far too long, and have spent that time haphazardly pinned up or dragging on the ground, and occasionally stepped- or sat-upon by the small set. I had already figured out the amount I needed to trim some weeks ago, so all I had to do was measure, cut, and hem.

Out came this beauty:

I think I’ve blogged about my machine before: a Singer 403A, passed down by my grandmother, that’s about the same age as my mom. I’ve had to replace a few small plastic parts, but it runs extremely well (especially now that I’ve corrected the small, crucial, error I had been making while threading it). Since I needed room for all of the curtain fabric, I hauled it downstairs to the dining room table — stopping in the bathroom on the way, out of curiosity, to weigh it. Eighteen pounds! Without the case at hand, I had to cradle it closely, like wearing 2-3 newborn babies in a sling at once.

I find great pleasure these days in the thing-ness of things, especially mechanical things. Using this machine is such a tactile experience: the weight and texture of the fabric, the smell of hot steel and machine oil, all the satisfying whirrs and snicks and thunks of the moving parts, the whisper of the thread unspooling. I tell the machine what it must do by manipulating a series of levers and knobs. To make it go very slowly, I use my hand to turn a wheel. To make it go quickly, I press a pedal with my foot. If I want to switch to a zig-zag or scallop stitch, I open up the top and insert a little disc that changes the movement of the mechanisms below. So satisfying!

It’s satisfying in part just because I think mechanical things are clever and cool (don’t even get me started on doorknobs). But anything that engages our bodies and our senses also offers a refreshing contrast to the way that so much of our work and pleasure is mediated to us via screens — and even when that work is good and useful, often it still only engages our bodies to the extent of giving us backaches and carpal tunnel syndrome. The screen provides a way of being in and interacting with the world that leaves me, on the whole, deeply ambivalent.

I’ve just finished reading Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley, a memoir detailing her time working in Silicon Valley — itself a profoundly ambivalent narrative. Wiener chronicles techbro culture from the inside, from a position that’s both critical and complicit, and there’s a lot to unpack inside — but in light of this morning’s activities I was forcefully struck by this passage:

I sometimes wondered whether there was a unique psychic burden shared by people who worked in technology, specifically those of us building and supporting software that existed only in the cloud. The abstractions of knowledge work were well documented, but this felt new. It was not just the cognitive dissonance of how lucrative and powerful tech companies had become, when their tools did not physically exist, but that all software was vulnerable, at any time, to erasure. Engineers could spend years writing programs only to have them updated, rewritten, and replaced. […]

My own psychic burden was that I could command a six-figure salary, yet I did not know how to do anything. Whatever I learned to do in my late twenties, I learned from online tutorials: how to remove mold from a windowsill; slow-cook fish; straighten a cowlick; self-administer a breast exam. Whenever I wrenched a piece of self-assembly furniture into place, or reinforced a loose button, I experienced an unfamiliar and antiquated type of satisfaction. I went so far as to buy a sewing machine, like I was looking for ways to shame myself.

I wasn’t alone. Half the programmers I knew between the ages of twenty-two and forty, mostly men, were discovering that their fingers were multipurpose. “It feels so good to do something with my hands,” they said, before launching into monologues about woodworking, or home-brewing or baking sourdough. […]

I envied Ian [a roboticist], who was trained to think in terms of hardware, the embodied world. He stared at a computer all day, too, but the laws of physics still applied. His relationship to the internet was different from mine: he didn’t have accounts on any of the social networks, was unfamiliar with memes and unattuned to the minutiae of other people’s lives. He didn’t stand up at the end of the day and think, as I did: Oh, right—a body.

Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley, pp. 218-9.

Note the adjectives modifying “satisfaction” there: unfamiliar, antiquated. Obsolete. And that is the techbro mindset in a nutshell, maybe: the work of the body outmoded; the body itself an obstacle until hacked and gamified; the solution, to everything, more technology. (And here is Wiener’s ambivalence on display, as it often is in Uncanny Valley. Even as she recognizes the psychic hazards of Silicon Valley’s bodiless work to create a bodiless world, she is still at least partially under its spell.) But I would suggest that the satisfaction that she felt in putting together furniture or reinforcing buttons, and the joyous bemusement of her programmer coworkers discovering physical hobbies, in fact points to the great truth that our bodies are not obsolete. They matter, in fact, very much—the things we (can) do with them matter, and our satisfaction in using them is natural and appropriate.

Anna Wiener bought a sewing machine to shame herself. She might do better just to sew some curtains.

The things we remember

/ Christine Pennylegion / 1 Comment

At the K-8 school I attended as a child, lunchrooms were provided for the younger grades, but grades seven and eight were given off-campus lunch privileges and told to go figure it out on our own. (Were we allowed to use the lunchroom if it rained? I don’t remember; I’m sure we felt ourselves too cool to do so in any case.) My friend group rotated through a series of haunts: two local parks, one of which had a wonderful ravine where we hung a rope swing and occasionally lost our shoes in the mud; the two street corners right by the school, where the variety stores sold pizza slices and penny candy; a local grocery store with a small restaurant inside; and the homes of friends who lived near the school, if their parents would tolerate it. (Also if they didn’t tolerate it, just with more sneaking.)

In grade eight, we discovered the public library.

Not that any of us were unfamiliar with the concept, or even with that particular branch, which was about a ten minute walk from school. I passed it twice a day. But I don’t think any of us had realised that it was open during school hours. This branch’s children’s section took up nearly the entire basement of the building. It had a few computers, and orange carpet, and best of all, a secluded nook with low tables and chairs, where we chewed through our illicit sandwiches and everything the middle grade shelves had to offer: Archie comics, R. L. Stine, Judy Bloom, Lois Lowry, V. C. Andrews… Somewhere along the line, one of us (who?) was the first to discover Diane Duane.

(Aside: I have always been enchanted by the wonderful symmetry of that name. In grade two we used to sneak off to the girls’ bathroom, turn off the lights, and scare ourselves silly chanting BloodyMary BloodyMary BloodyMary into the mirror. Could I summon something with a well-timed DianeDuane DianeDuane DianeDuane? Perhaps I could, in the age of googling oneself. Diane, are you reading this? Sorry for being so weird! End of aside.)

I read The Book of Night with Moon, which concerns a group of wizard cats in NYC; I know this because I cheerfully plagiarized it in a short story I wrote that year. And I remember that story chiefly because my mother used it as an occasion to demonstrate how to use a semicolon to separate place names in a list. Thanks, Mom! What the plot of the book is I couldn’t tell you. Nor could I have given you any details about her Young Wizards series of books, which I assumed I hadn’t read when I started the first one earlier this month. But! I must have read them, because I chanced across this passage in Deep Wizardry (the second book in the series) and immediately recognized it:

I didn’t remember anything about the main characters, the thrust of the plot, the way magic works, or any of the books’ Very Exciting Adventury Stuff: becoming whales, going to Mars, battling the Lone Power in an alternate universe, fighting alongside and against various figures from Irish mythology, etc. etc. etc. None of that stuck. But this specific image, of learning to walk on the ocean — and, later, a short note on how tiring it was, because you had to use muscles that aren’t involved in walking on flat surfaces — for whatever reason, this is the nugget my brain decided to keep. Why? Beats me. But I’m delighted it did, and delighted for the memories it unlocked of those dusty lunch breaks in the far corner of the children’s library, sneaking chips and apples from our bags under the table, and passing around the books that turned out to be shaping us.

LaserWriter II

/ Christine Pennylegion

I finished this dreamy little book about a week ago and I’m still thinking about it.

It’s not a plot-heavy novel; in fact, virtually nothing happens in it. It’s the 1990s in NYC. A young woman named Claire gets a job at an indie Mac repair shop called TekServe, works there for a while, learns to repair printers, leaves for other things, and that’s about it. It’s not a page-turner in the traditional sense.

Where Tamara Shopsin excels, however, is in the her ability to vividly capture a particular moment in time and space — that’s what LaserWriter II is really about, I think — and the delightful, dense imagery of her prose. I mean, look at this:

Claire waits till she is called over. Gary’s side of the bench is six steps, but a world away. Pop music by a girl groups always seems to blare — the coffee shop kind, spiced up with a violin or a flute.

Gary’s fingers are stiff and bloated like a stale pretzel that hangs from an umbrella of a hot dog stand. He tries to remove a plastic sensor that is akin to the metal prong of a doll’s shoe buckle. Sweat beads on his forehead. Claire is afraid it will drip into the printer.

It does. (107)

Or this:

As Deb worked at 163, more specialized technicians were added and intake was created. The Mac Plus was programmed to be a “now serving” machine and mounted above like a convenience store mirror. A billiard ball was hung on a string next to it, and was pulled to advance the serving numbers.

Customers came to the second floor depressed, clutching their ailing computers, to find a space that was as if Santa’s workshop had made love to a Rube Goldberg machine, complete with mutated elves. Hearts would melt, Coca-Cola would flow from glass bottles, and customers would wait patiently for their number to be called.

Soon Tekserve outgrew 163 and moved a few doors down to the fourth floor of 155 23rd Street. Everything and everyone came along for the move, and it was the same, only more. (47)

“It was the same, only more”. I love that. It’s just six words, but how evocative! I don’t know if Shopsin writes poetry, but I think she probably could (and maybe should). The narrative is also occasionally broken up by whimsical little interludes where printer parts discuss things like philosophy with each other while Claire cleans and repairs them. Which sounds weird, I know, but somehow it really works.

LaserWriter II is a strange, dreamy, nerdy little novel — and I’m really glad that I picked it up.

Reading Round-Up: January 2022

/ Christine Pennylegion

Ah, the first books of 2022! It was a big month for fiction in general and fantasy in particular. And you know that thing where you discover a new author, and you enjoy the first book of theirs you read, and then you decide to just read… all of them? Yes, that. Here’s the rundown:

  • Princess Academy (Shannon Hale)
  • Princess Academy: Palace of Stone (Shannon Hale)
  • Princess Academy: The Forgotten Sisters (Shannon Hale)
  • Austenland (Shannon Hale)
  • Midnight in Austenland (Shannon Hale)
  • Because Internet (Gretchen McCulloch)
  • Cryoburn (Lois McMaster Bujold)
  • Welcome to Dunder Mifflin (Brian Baumgartner and Ben Silverman)
  • The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
  • The Wandering Fire (Guy Gavriel Kay)
  • The Darkest Road (Guy Gavriel Kay)
  • The Postman (David Brin) *did not finish

My kids love Shannon Hale’s early reader series, The Princess in Black [and the yada yada] and I thought I’d try out her Princess Academy series, which is more middle grade. It’s nothing like you’re probably assuming from the name, and all three books were great reads. (And fast — there’s nothing like reading three novels in three days to make you feel like you’re starting the year off right!) Miri lives a simple life with her father and sister on a Mount Eskel, where her village mines for valuable linder stone. But when a prophecy reveals that the next heir to the throne will marry a girl from her village, Miri finds herself in the “princess academy” from which the prince will choose a bride in a year’s time. Needless to say, things don’t turn out to be as straightforward as advertised. This was a really enjoyable little trilogy.

Austenland is one of Hale’s adult novels, a light romance set at an exclusive — like, sign-an-NDA-exclusive — Jane Austen-themed retreat where staff and guests live a fully immersive Regency-era experience (albeit with indoor plumbing). Pride and Prejudice-obsessed New Yorker Jane Hayes is gifted a fortnight at the retreat courtesy of her aunt, who hopes that it will help Jane to sort out her romantic ideals. Guests at Pembrook Park can enjoy some genteel flirting with the actors who fill out the scene — but where is the line between handsome “Mr Nobley” and the man who plays him? And is he in love with “Miss Erstwhile,” her Regency-era alternate identity, or with Jane herself? It’s a light, fun read.

I went into Midnight in Austenland blind, expecting more of the above. It’s still a quasi-Regency romance set at Pembrook Park, with some recurring characters as well as a new protagonist — but it’s also a creepy murder mystery, complete with actual corpse. Um, what? Still enjoyable, but it also kind of gave me whiplash.

Gretchen McCulloch’s Because Internet is definitely the most fascinating book I read this month. McCulloch is a linguist with a particular interest in informal writing, something that we’ve never really been able to study at any sort of scale until the advent of the internet. Why do some people think it’s passive-aggressive to punctuate the end of text messages? What’s with the parallel evolution of emoticons and emojis? How did we start using ~sparkle text~ for irony and the “/s” tag for sarcasm? Why do Boomers capitalize so much of their messages (LOL)? How (and why) do memes work? Gretchen McCulloch will tell you!

Cryoburn is either the 15th or 18th or 22nd installment of Lois McMaster Bujold’s sprawling Vorkosigan saga, depending on if you’re counting in internal chronology or publication order, and whether or not you think short stories or only novels count as “installments”. At any rate, it’s well towards the end of the series, and of the read-through I started back in the fall. I don’t even know where to begin in terms of summing things up, but it’s all glorious space opera, and if you’re a sci-fi fan even a little, they’re worth your time. Start with either Cordelia’s Honor or The Warrior’s Apprentice.

Welcome to Dunder Mifflin was my only other foray into the nonfiction section this month; it’s a collected oral history of The Office drawn from interviews conducted by Brian Baumgartner for his podcast… The Oral History of the Office (hmm). I’d listened to most of the podcast so there wasn’t really any new information in the book for me, but hey, at least there were pictures.

The Summer Tree, The Wandering Fire, and The Darkest Road make up Guy Gavriel Kay’s Fionavar Tapestry trilogy. I was first introduced to these books, and to Kay’s writing, when I was assigned The Summer Tree as an independent reading project in grade nine (thank you, Mrs. R), and I scored an omnibus edition at a library book sale when I was in undergrad. He is one of my favourite fantasy authors now, and this trilogy has been a companion of mine for many years. The story begins when five Toronto men and women go to hear a public lecture at UofT’s Convocation Hall — but are then summoned by the mage Loren Silvercloak to his home world, the world from which all worlds are spun, Fionavar. Although they are only supposed to be there for a week or two, as an exotic present for a reigning king, they are quickly drawn into magic, intrigue, and a desperate war against the fallen god, Rakoth Maugrim. It’s fantastic stuff.

Finally, The Postman by David Brin. I don’t usually keep track of books that I don’t finish, but I read enough (about 2/3rds, plus the last chapter) that I think it counts. The Postman is a post-acpocalyptic novel set in the United States around the turn of the millennium. After years of pandemics, nuclear attacks, and civil skirmishes, what’s left of the country has dissolved into small pockets of survivors: communes, nascent fiefdoms, dens of burglars, and lone wanderers. Gordon Krantz is one such wanderer, who comes across a USPS uniform in Oregon, dons it, and begins conning a nation back into being. The Postman has been made into a movie and won a whole bunch of awards, and I wanted to like it. But while the concept is very interesting, I found the writing clunky and dated, and Brin kept bringing his characters to the brink of action and then using chapter breaks to fast-forward right past it. Great idea, less than stellar execution. This was a disappointing read.

And that’s a wrap!

Reading notes: 2020/1

/ Christine Pennylegion / 2 Comments

Happy New Year! I’m quite flabbergasted that it’s 2022 already; the pandemic has played real havoc with my sense of time. 2020 seemed to last about a decade. 2021, on the other hand, was over in about six minutes. I did find time to read in the last year and change, although the changes to my recording method meant that far, far fewer books got written up here on ye old blog (well, the changes, and the mush-brain that seems like it’s affected me in more of covidtide than not). I am definitely not going to attempt to chronicle them all now (!) — but here are some highlights of my last 1.5 years in books.

July – Sept 2020 (27 books total)

Aug 9 — Fog by Katherine Scanlan. This odd and beautiful little book did get its own post. I read a library copy, but just got one of my own for Christmas & I have no doubt I will return to it many more times.

Open by Andre Agassi. As my husband will readily attest, while I don’t particularly care for sports as such, I love good sports writing. Combine that with my love for memoirs, and it’s no wonder I found Open completely engrossing. It also offered a sober warning regarding some parenting pitfalls, chief among them what happens when you force your children to pursue your dreams instead of their own.

Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan. This was my first Riordan book, and it was quickly followed by the rest of the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, and then the Heroes of Olympus series, and then the Trials of Apollo series, and what I’m saying is, boy can Rick Riordan write a novel. Don’t let the “middle grade” label turn you off. They’re fantastic.

Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years by Elizabeth Wayland Barber. This one also made it to a standalone post. I still think about it sometimes.

Never Cry Wolf by Farley Mowat. This is a Canadian non-fiction classic. And now I know a lot about wolves! Wolves are cool.

Oct – Dec 24 2020 (29 books total)

Dead Cold by Louise Penny is here standing in for the Three Pines series entire, or nearly: I read her first book, Still Life, in the last block, and then between October and mid-December last year I read Dead Cold, The Cruellest Month, A Rule Against Murder, The Brutal Telling, Bury Your Dead, A Trick of the Light, The Beautiful Mystery, How the Light Gets In, The Long Way Home, The Nature of the Beast, A Great Reckoning, Glass Houses, Kingdom of the Blind, and A Better Man. Phew! At this remove they blend into each other a fair bit, but I remember A Great Reckoning, The Long Way Home, and The Beautiful Mystery as being especially fine. (They’re best read in order, though.)

The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. by Neal Stephenson and Nicole Galland. This was a reread for me, but it held up to a second go-round. Alternate earth timeline. Government agencies. Time-travel. Witches. It’s a great romp (also bit of a doorstopper).

But What I Really Want to Do is Direct by Ken Kwapis. I like movie behind-the-scenes extras even more than I like movies. I’ve watched all the extra features for The Lord of the Rings. I’ve hugely enjoyed the episodes I’ve seen of the Netflix series The Movies that Made Us. I listen to Office Ladies and The Office Deep Dive. But What I Really Want to Do is Direct scratches that exact same itch, and I enjoyed getting a glimpse at behind-the-scenes from the directorial point of view.

Christmas 2020 – March 4 2021 (30 books total)

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke. So help me, I cannot resist a novel with footnotes. I cannot. This was another reread and I loved it all the more for already having my footing in terms of the setting/world-building. It’s an astonishing book.

Wine Girl by Victoria James. The thing I love about memoirs is that you learn the most interesting things about little parts of life for which you might never otherwise spare a thought. Wine Girl chronicles James’s journey as America’s youngest-ever sommelier. While I enjoy drinking wine I know exactly nothing about it, and this book was a fascinating peek at the weird world of professional wine people.

The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway broke my heart. (The actual cellist of Sarajevo was not so happy with it, however.)

Dearly by Margaret Atwood. Overall, I found this collection to be a little uneven, but it was worth reading just for the titular poem alone, and its last line still reverberates in my heart.

March 4 – July 3 2021 (30 books total)

The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson. I’ve been listening, on and off, to the Writing Excuses podcast for a few years now, so I wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with BrandoSando, but this was my first encounter with his writing. The Way of Kings is the first book in the Stormlight Archive series, which is set in a sprawling and absolutely fascinating world. I read the four full novels that are out, as well as two novellas set in between some of them… unfortunately the last book in the series isn’t slated to come out until Christmas 2023. I suppose that just means I’ll have time to reread the others in time for its release!

A Deadly Education by Naomi Novik. Okay, so it’s a school-of-magic book, like Hogwarts. Except there aren’t teachers, and the school is infested with maleficaria that regularly kill off 3/4 of the graduating class, and the school is semi-sentient and also, maybe not malevolent exactly, but not exactly pro-student either. So, you know, actually not much like Hogwarts at all. (I will read anything that Naomi Novik writes and you should too.)

Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford. It’s 1944 and a busy London street is hit with a bomb, killing five children. Only what if they didn’t die? What would their futures have held? Spufford rewinds the clock, diverts the bomb, and follows his five characters through the decades of the rapidly-changing 21st century. It’s a breathtaking, beautiful endeavour. I read an electronic copy and took… many screenshots.

A Girl from Yamhill and My Own Two Feet by Beverly Cleary. These two memoirs are really two halves of one whole, so I’ll list them together. We are big Cleary fans in this house, and I am perpetually rereading her books to Anselm and Perpetua (Socks is the current favourite). Her memoirs are absolutely charming.

July 4 – Oct 22 2021 (30 books total)

Mozart’s Starling by Lyanda Lynn Haupt. Mozart kept a pet starling, and so did/does Haupt. This is a thoroughly charming little book about starlings, about music, and about finding kindred spirits in surprising places.

In a Holidaze by Christina Lauren. I read a lot of purely escapist books in this period, including several by Christina Lauren (the nom-de-plume of writing partners Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings). In a Holidaze involved a Groundhog Day-style time loop and was easily my favourite of the lot.

Garlic and Sapphires by Ruth Reichl. This is food writer and critic Ruth Reichl’s account of her years as the NYT’s food critic in the 1990s, and of the lengths to which she had to go in order to visit restaurants anonymously. Reichl is an inviting writer and I read two of her other books in this period as well.

To Have and to Hoax by Martha Waters. See above re: escapism. This was a fun regency-era novel following a husband and wife who end up staging an escalating series of fake accidents and illnesses in a bid to win back the other’s affection. It’s silly and satisfying.

Uncommon Type by Tom Hanks. If I’m in the mood for a move and don’t know what else to pick, I’ll generally default to a 90s rom-com, so I feel like I’ve seen a lot of Tom Hanks lately. As it turns out, he can write as well as act, and this collection of short stories thoroughly charmed me.

Oct 23 – Dec 31 2021 (25 books total)

A Carnival of Snackery by David Sedaris. I have to be in the mood for David Sedaris, but when I am, I really am. This is a collection of his diary excerpts from 2003-2020, and it was so interesting reading someone else’s thoughts on things I’ve actually lived through. Plus, you know, he’s awfully funny.

The Inheritance Games by Jennifer Lynn Barnes. Let’s just say I’m not surprised this was a runaway bestseller.

Termination Shock by Neal Stephenson. I went into this one knowing nothing about it except that I always enjoy Stephenson’s books. Turns out it’s about climate change. And Sikh martial arts. And constitutional monarchies. And performative warfare. And feral pigs. It was great.

The Deep Places by Ross Douthat. Douthat is probably best known as a conservative, Catholic commentator for the NYT. He also suffers from Lyme disease, and The Deep Places is a history of the disease in the wider sense as well as in his own life. It is a touching account of the “terrible gift” of chronic illness, and surely a bit of a memento mori for those of us who haven’t been so touched.

And that’s… well, that’s not the lot! But it’s certainly enough for now, and as it’s high time to end this post, I will simply wish you all some wonderful reading in 2022.