Healthy Reading Checkup: Q3 & Q4 2019

Who could have predicted this? Who would have guessed that having a child would mean that my pace would fall from 21 books in the first half of the year to a measly 8 in the second half? And that instead of posting a quarterly update some time around the beginning of October, I would instead be pushing two quarters together for one end-of-year update? It is almost as if becoming a parent changes your whole life or something. Nevertheless, with what reading I was able to do in the second half of 2019, I still made a conscious effort to read in a way that expands my horizons, reduces stress, challenges me, and improves my mental health. As I said in June, this was never going to be about volume read, but the quality of my reading choices.

So, what were the final books that rounded out my reading this year? Why did I chose the books I did? Were they helpful, healthy, diverse reading choices? What does my reading future look like?

22. Stories From the Vinyl Cafe by Stuart McLean

Why?: This was my annual camping read; and while it was not as profound an experience as other books I have brought to read in the great Canadian wilderness, it was a purposeful choice. I have been working for about a year now on a large research and writing project about my grandparents. My granddad has been a devotee of Stuart McLean as long as I have known him, and I looked to this early collection of stories to find a new way to connect with my grandfather.

Health check: While Stuart McLean was an older white male author, and therefore among the most overrepresented demographic in publishing, he was (and will always be) a Canadian icon. His viewpoints may not be groundbreaking, nor open me up to ideas which are foreign to my own experience. Nevertheless, his storytelling echoes with a warmth and nostalgia that cleanses the soul. The simple truths he speaks are universal, despite being cast in hegemonic white suburbia, and there is comfort in going back home to a place that never existed.

23. Caring For Your Baby and Young Child by Steven P Shelov et al.

Why?: Because Angela and I had a baby! Parenthood has been the most indescribably wonderful experience of our lives, but looking at it from the outside was terrifying. I wanted to read everything I could to be best prepared for every challenge we may face. Of course, all of that reading and preparation goes out the window when you are faced with the very real and daunting task of caring for an actual human baby, but I am glad I did my homework anyway.

Health check: Disappointingly, this book was also written by an old white man. On one had, I wish I had tried harder in our prenatal days to seek out other voices on childbirth and parenting. On the other hand, I am much more interested in fact- and science-based approaches to these subjects, and it seems from my own observation that many more white men have been given the opportunity to write those types of guides than the next closest group.

24. Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng

Why?: This book has been on my list to read since it was released to wide acclaim. I waited as long as I could for a paperback release (not because of the price but because I hate owning hardcover books for shelving purposes). Eventually, when the paperback showed no signs of coming, I went and renewed my long-lapsed library card specifically in order to take out and read this book.

Health check: Little Fires Everywhere joins Fifth Business on a very short list of perfect books I have read in my life. I have since bought Ng’s first novel, the similarly-acclaimed Everything I Never Told You, and can’t wait to read more from her. The breathtaking realism and devastating truths in this book held me rapt to the final word. An Asian-American woman wrote the best book I read this year, and that makes me quite happy.

25. Wizard’s First Rule by Terry Goodkind

Why?: I was leant a copy of this book ages ago, when I was sampling a number of other epic fantasy series to try to find a new obsession. I picked it up and put it down many times before actually committing to getting through it.

Health check: This was the first outright poor reading decision since starting the year with After James. Especially knowing that I have yet to read N.K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth series, slogging through a tired and derivative first chapter of a gargantuan epic written by – you guessed it – an old white guy was a complete waste of time in retrospect. I am still surprised I finished this one at all, and I don’t like what it detracts from my attempts to diversify.

26. Casino Royale by Ian Fleming

Why?: I have been casually making my way through all the Bond movies for the past year or so, and so I figured I would pick up the first of the original Fleming novels to give them a try. This turns out to have been an error of unfathomable proportions.

Health check: There is nothing to be found in this book of the charm, wit, and fun of Bond on film. Instead, his innuendo is replaced with aggressive chauvinism; his charm is replaced with cold malice; his ingenuity is replaced with dumb luck. The casual racism and overt sexism make this an abysmal read, and I will go out of my way to never read another. Love the movies, hate the book. An uninspired white male saviour written by a white male author. Shame on me.

27. City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert

Why: Having heard her speak and be interviewed many times, I have deep admiration for Elizabeth Gilbert. She is a wonderful writer, thinker, and human being. Naturally, I could not wait to check out this foray into fiction!

Health check: Liz Gilbert is as remarkable in fiction as she is in memoir, and her unabashed celebration of womanhood and female sexuality in the 20th century left me in tears. The vision she conjures of seedy theatre life in WWII-era New York City is salacious and delicious. The audiobook narrated by Blair Brown is highly recommended.

28. What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell

Why?: I have become obsessed with Malcolm Gladwell’s engrossing podcast, Revisionist History, and I have heard him discuss some of the case studies from this book in other interviews. The way he makes the obscure both fascinating and accessible is unmatched by any other public intellectual I have encountered.

Health check: Gladwell is a Canadian treasure, and that rare celebrity who has not jumped ship on their home and native land as soon as the spotlight found them. He represents multiple ethnic backgrounds, and somewhat epitomizes the Canadian spirit of fairness, openness, and inclusivity. This book is also of a genre (sociology/anthropology/social studies generally, though it is also more than the sum of those parts) that I have rarely explored. I am glad that I read this one.

29. Debt: The First 5000 Years by David Graeber

Why?: If I remember correctly, I first heard of this book when it was mentioned on Dax Shepard and Monica Padman’s excellent podcast, Armchair Expert. I don’t even remember the context now in which it came up, but I remember being intrigued. Ever since reading Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens, I am always eager to read these sorts of broadly digestible essays on deeply interesting topics (in Harari’s case, a grand unified theory of anthropology and human history; in Graeber’s case a fundamental reimagining of the origins of money and economic systems).

Health check: Another book by another white guy was not how I imagined this year of conscious reading would end, but the horizon-expanding and preconception-challenging which this one prompted makes me feel less guilty about it. This was a fascinating look at what seems, from the outside, to be among the world’s most boring subjects: economic history. The audiobook was hugely helpful in making it digestible for me, and kept me thoroughly engaged for many commutes.

***

Summary

Books read: 29

Books by Canadian authors: 5

Genre diversity: 

• Fiction (General) – 14
• Narrative nonfiction – 3
• Children’s Fantasy – 3
• Nonfiction (General) – 6
• Young Adult – 2
• Western – 1

Gender breakdown (Authors):

• Women – 10
• Men – 19
• Nonbinary – 0

Ethnic breakdown (Authors):

• White – 21
• Black – 3
• Indigenous – 2 (disputed; Joseph Boyden’s claim to Native Canadian ancestry has been questioned)
• Latin American – 1
• Jewish – 1
• Asian American – 1

Here at the end of the year, I would be lying to say I am ecstatic with my results. I certainly underestimated how drastically my reading time would be reduced after having a child, which meant that the long list of books by non-white, LGBTQ+, and other underrepresented authors simply didn’t get finished. But I did have time to read 8 books in this latter half of the year and I chose 5 by white men, so I have no one to blame but myself. Ultimately, I am glad that a quarter of the books I read this year we’re by non-white authors, and more than a third were by women – I don’t have the stats, but I have to imagine this is better than my lifetime average. And I truly feel the way that I choose books has changed. Looking at what has already made it into my TBR pile for 2020, I see the fruits of the efforts I made this year to overcome my biases. Reading with more awareness for my prejudices, seeking out marginalized voices, and broadening my horizons have made me a better reader – and just as importantly, have contributed greatly to my enjoyment of reading this year. And that, at least, is a success.

Words on Words – January 2016

I made a commitment to myself (I refuse to call it a resolution) to make more time to read this year. I used to read voraciously, consuming books in one sitting, reading anything and everything I could get my hands on. The bar code on my library card wore out from constantly being pulled out of and shoved back into my wallet. Lately, however, there have been a million excuses not to read. Life, work, and play take up so much time, I tell myself, that reading just isn’t possible. My library card and bookshelves have sat collecting dust.

So I set out, at the dawn of 2016, to rekindle that fervour. I set the bar at 50 books. I will read 50 books this year. I will read 50 books this year. I set no parameters for the books I will read. They will be of all lengths, all genres, all subject matters. I will rely heavily on referrals, asking friends and relations for books that have spoken to them. And in an effort to revive this much neglected space, I will reflect, at the end of each month, on the books I have thus read, and particular words in each which have spoken to me.

Perhaps this will be of no interest to anyone. Perhaps it will merely be a testament to myself, and keep me honest. Perhaps that is enough.

Here are the books I read in January, in order, and the words therein that stayed with me:

#1

“Human beings are more or less formulas. Pun intended. We are not any one thing that is mathematically provable. We are more or less than we are anything. We are more or less kind, or more or less not. More or less selfish, happy, wise, lonely.” – Never Always Sometimes by Adi Alsaid

Adi Alsaid’s first novel, Let’s Get Lost, was one of the best books I read last year. I featured it in one of the very first Words on Words. I found his writing deliciously readable. It was relatable without being commonplace, deep without feeling self-important. It was wise and playful and addictive and great. I was excited, therefore, to delve into this sophomore effort as the first book of the fifty I will read this year. Here again, as is naturally the case with many books about teenagers, Alsaid is concerned with the things which form our understanding of the self during that fertile time. It is a book about first loves, and second loves, and striving to be original.

The passage above stuck with me as I read the novel, and long afterward. Alsaid’s observations, on the whole, are gentle reflections on the human experience. He does not make an overt effort to be profound. He merely holds up a mirror to the reader and says, “What do you think?” And in this case he is exactly right. We often live our lives striving to be a hyperbole; we want to be the best at this thing or the most of that. We want to be an extreme, standing out from the herd of the utterly average. But to think that way misunderstands ourselves, and misunderstands the other. We are not completely one thing, or totally another, just at those we perceive as cliche and unexceptional are not entirely the things we believe about them. We are, all of us, more or less.

#2

The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life. – Love After Love by Derek Walcott, introduced by Tom Hiddleston

Poems That Make Grown Men Cry, while I disagree with the inherent gender stereotype in the title, is an excellently curated book of poetry. 100 men in the public sphere were asked to comment on the poems which evoke the most emotion in them; the result is a stunning and varied collection of great works. While there were poems which made me emote more strongly than this one (Daniel Radcliffe submitted Long Distance I and II by Tony Harrison, and JJ Abrams submitted The Lanyard by Billy Collins; you have been warned), Love After Love instantly felt like the kind of poem worth knowing by heart. I have never felt inclined to learn poetry by rote (excluding Shakespeare), but I felt such a deep connection to the language and the message of this piece. It is something I think about constantly: after we are done spending a lifetime living to please others, what we must hope is that the life we look back on is a feast of memory we may savour. At the end of the journey, it does not matter how rich our life was in the eyes of others; it is us who will sit down to feast on the recollection of the life we lived. As Hiddleston points out in his introduction, we live our lives trying to be “enough” for other people. The poet gently and perfectly reminds us that we are enough, each of us, as we are. Sit. Feast on your life.

#3

“But a knife ain’t just a thing, is it? It’s a choice, it’s something you do. A knife says yes or no, cut or not, die or don’t. A knife takes a decision out of your hand and puts it in the world and it never goes back again.” – The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness

The Knife of Never Letting Go is a book about everything. It is about the chaos and the multitudes and the complexities inside of us that make us misunderstand ourselves and others. It is about responsibility. It is about accepting what life hands to us, however great or terrible, and making something out of it. It is about societal pressure and men and women and innocence and guilt and humanity. Patrick Ness has been one of my very favourite novelists for a while now – his  The Crane Wife and More Than This have been featured on this blog, and his A Monster Calls is one of the most emotionally impactful books I have ever read. He has, once again, created a beautifully realized world that is just different enough from our own to make you feel vulnerable as you explore it. The problem I run into when trying to discern what spoke most deeply to me in the novel, however, is that the book is fantastic in its entirety. The various passages and phrases I have tried to lift from the story for their particularly well-formed prose or their deeper observations simply do not do justice to what this book is.

I settled on the quotation above because it comes the closest, perhaps, to striking the bell at the heart of this novel, without giving too much away. While undeniably more powerful in context, I think it speaks to the important lesson that the things that happen to us do not define us. We define ourselves by the way we handle those things. The knife in our hand, the knife which we are handed, does not cut out our path in the jungle of life. We are holding the knife. We cut our own way through.

#4

“Six degrees of separation doesn’t mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.” – The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

Gladwell’s book was an interesting, quick read for me – well outside the normal realm of my literary ingestion, but that is one of the things I desired most of this project. It has a few inherent flaws: one, that the first chapters of the book are far more compelling in their argumentation than the last; and two, that most of the really interesting arguments could have been summed up in a much shorter work than the 294 pages of the copy I read. Perhaps I felt this way because I am more literary than the economists and sociologists featured in the book, and for whom it was written. Distributed among the verbosity, however, there are a number of interesting observations to be found on Gladwell’s topic: the ways in which small ideas can explode into movements and epidemics. He talks at length about the movers and shakers who are most often responsible for the “tipping” of trends and ideas, the specific personality types who have just the right blend of skills and traits to facilitate wide-scale change. I couldn’t help, as I read his descriptions of these various personality types, to consider the people in my life who might fit into each category – and which, if any, I fall into myself. I am not sure I fall into any, but I was taken with the idea of what Gladwell describes as a Connector, someone with a diverse group of acquaintances who brings the right people into contact with one another, bridging the gaps between distinct groups to facilitate the transmission of ideas. I am fortunate to know a few such people, these “special few,” who keep me connected more widely to the world around me, who broaden my understanding with their diverse knowledge and connectivity. Gladwell’s reflection made me grateful for them.

*****

One month down. Eleven months and 46 books to go! Check back every month for more Words on Words and other thoughts on An Awfully Big Adventure!