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| Painting by Victoria Riechelt |
This was a year where I read a lot—maybe more than I had since I was an undergrad earning an English lit degree—and I also read barely at all, if you judge by how much remained in my brain after I closed the book. I think a lot of people can relate to this, given the general mood of anxiety and distraction (as a side note, my favourite thing right now is that when you google "how many days since," the search engine will helpfully auto-suggest "since March 13?"which, for us here in Ontario, was the day when the shit really hit the fan in terms of lockdowns). Reading is, of course, transportative, recreational, imagination-play for grown-ups. It can make us more empathetic, improve our vocabularies, helps with stress and with sleep, all of which are helpful—perhaps vital—skills to practice in 2020.
During These Times, I read a lot of news: doomscrolling on Instagram and Facebook, reading issues of The New York Times and The New Yorker basically looking through my fingers because everything seemed so dire. Reading the news was homework in the apocalypse; reading anything else was a distraction, a balm, and a reason to keep my brain from turning into an anxiety Jell-O.
Here are the books I read that made a difference in this year! Instead of chronologically, they can be roughly filed into three categories, all of which say something about my position in the world. This is also not a complete list, but rather the ones that stuck to me; I thought about them after I closed them up. Feel free to read them, or don't! But message me if you do, and we can do Zoom book club.
Category Is: Ugh, Family
* I kicked off the year with This Is Where I Leave You, the story of a dysfunctional family sitting shiva after the father dies. I didn't love this one, because no one in it seemed all that likeable (and yes, I know, if we required that book characters be likeable, our shelves would be quite sparse), and the whole book seemed like an exercise in how much toxic masculinity Jonathan Tropper could pump into a single manuscript before an editor pursed her lips and went "hmmm." (Not recommended.)
* I read Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine in a single evening while in bed with a fever, so the book's impression on me is rather more emotional than literary. I liked it, as I tend to like any story of a woman self-actualizing out of her own shitty life, but it has some tough spots. People sell this as a comedy, but if you're tender-hearted (temporarily, due to pandemic, or chronically, as I am), be warned that there are some dark bits. (Recommended.)
* Rules for Visiting, which I listened to as an audiobook and did not finish, was a very gentle probing of friendship and relationships, family and travel. It's not silly, but the stakes are fairly low, and that can be reassuring. I also learned a lot about trees, and in a year where much time was spent in the gardening, this felt like a lovely supplementary text. In fact, I just got the audiobook out for a second time as I typed this. (Recommended.)
* I read Educated in two nights, in a thrill of anxiety. It is grim. It is Grimm Brothers-grim. It is not particularly well-written, but it is absolutely gripping: Tara Westover, raised by apocalyptic Mormons in Idaho, eventually realizes she wants to go to university after never stepping foot in a school as a child. It is just full of horrible moments, and sometimes, the only thing that kept me reading was knowing that the girl in the pages also had her name on the cover; she had made it out alive. This was not a "great read" in any sense, but functioned as a bit of a reminder that horror is not just relegated to the front page of The Globe and Mail: it lives in our own houses just as often. (Recommended, but yikes.)
Category Is: Supernatural Teens
* I re-read the Harry Potter series in the first eight weeks of lockdown; it was my bedtime reading, something I could dive into without paying too much attention. I know JK Rowling is intensely problematic, so if you would like to follow in my footsteps, may I suggest your local library? Or at least being aware of why she sucks and what we can do about it if you want to engage with the texts but not support her. As a fan of Harry Potter who came to the series in adulthood, I still enjoy the books and the fandom especially; because they're as immersive as any other fiction, they're a great thing to read during long periods of being in the house (aka Q2 of 2020). If you read the books, I'm also going to insist that you listen to Witch, Please, in order to give yourself the skills to do critical takedowns where needed; you may also like Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, which sounds religious but is actually just a very well-structured podcast that is a bit gentler but still gives lots of food for thought. (Recommended, but do your homework.)
* In the summer, after JKR's baloney statements made wide circulation, several corrective "If you like Harry Potter but are done with this bullshit" reading lists circulated. Many included Akata Witch; the story of a Nigerian girl who discovers she's a "leopard person," or a juju practitioner/witch, and falls in with a group of other leopard people as they do battle against evil. It's a fascinating rejection of what we think of as "witch" (white women being persecuted for herbalism, abortion, and Satanic dealings) and globalizes the perspective in important ways. It's also a fun read! (Recommended.)
* When I asked online what the funniest book folks had read was, Lamb was a resounding winner. Telling the story of Jesus (yes, that Jesus) during his childhood and teen years, it wasn't the funniest book I'd ever read (that dubious honour goes to Dave Barry's Book of Bad Songs, which is extremely funny if you were 13 in 1997), but it was pretty funny. (Lukewarm recommended.)
Category Is: Self-Work, Ritual, and Community Vibes
Okay, so bear with me. After my son was born in 2016, I started to become aware of a hungriness in my life. The birth had been unexpectedly traumatic, and there was no obvious way for me to work through the transition from not-a-parent to parent, which was a surprisingly tough switch. I felt unmoored, on edge, different and in mourning for myself and what I had gone through. And yet, I was also relieved beyond measure to have had our small bear, loving him and finding reserves of patience that I had no idea existed. 2016 was a long, confusing year.
2018 was another such year. We got priced out of Toronto in February and moved to Stratford; Mike stayed behind and there were, as his mother would memorably put it, "shenanigans;" our house was small and dark and full of cockroaches by November. When I look back on November 2018-February 2019, I can see now that I was having a mental and emotional breakdown; when I was in it, I thought I was losing my mind.
After I started feeling better—another move, EMDR, spending time with my parents, and preschool all helped—I realized that I had been through something. Lots of people have this in their lives: the loss of a loved one, through death or divorce; unexpected moves; births; illnesses; chronic pain; toxic jobs. I'm a person who finds it much easier to talk to the void (a blog post, an Instagram story) than to say, in a small voice to a friend, "I feel sad and lonely, please take care of me." Honesty is hard. So is figuring out how to mark the transition from the person I was, to the person I am now. So is living in a society where positivity is enforced through "you go girl!"-ish statements that make me want to screeeeeam. I started looking at rituals, because if felt like that was the void in my life: the conversation about how we (personally, culturally, and humanly) mark the change from not-a-parent to parent, from healthy marriage to one that teeters on the brink, from one house to another, from a boss that makes us feel like an insect to one that doesn't, from healthy bodies to something more complicated, from one way of being to another, is a conversation that we have become fairly bad at. Like any good fan of Hermione Granger, I started at the library, and I'm still there. We'll see where this all goes.
ANYWAY, the point of that long and meandering digression was to say: these are the books I read this summer and fall in service of this interest.
* The Power of Ritual, which talks about different types of modern ritual and why they exist, in a chatty and rather less-secular way. I will probably go back to this one a few times as I continue this journey. (Recommended.)
* Belonging: Remembering Ourselves Home, which I bought because I love the cover artist and it's been floating around on the bedside table of women I admire for years. It's about dreams (like, literal sleep-dreams) and also finding who you are where you fit. I like it but it's also dense with things that make me stare off into space while I think about them, so it's taking me a while to get through. (Recommended, so far.)
* Belong is much quicker and poppier, a community-building workbook for people who like to do eat brunch and jet off to Bali for dance parties (obviously, me). It's a bit 101 and extremely cheerful!!!, but I still learned a bunch of stuff. (Recommended.)
* For Small Creatures Such As We was written by Carl Sagan's daughter Sasha, and is a meditation on the natural world and its rhythms, along with her grappling with the death of her scientist father. It's not prescriptive the way the other books here are; rather, it's gentle, personal and open-ended. (Recommended.)
* The Art of Gathering is freaking great. I might be biased because I am deeply interested what makes good community happen, especially on a small scale, but this one is fascinating if you ever spent time in a structured way with other people—parties, book clubs, dinners with other couples, conferences, walking tours, yoga classes, whatever. It's all in there. I don't know how her advice will change in COVID-inflected world, but I am so glad to have read this book. (Highly recommended.)
