The everywhere-lists of December send me to my book journal, to review my reading experiences of the year and distill them into a favourites list of my own.

It’s impossible, though. Favourites isn’t the best word in any case; memorable–for a variety of reasons–might be better. So let me list a few, or maybe more than a few, of my memorable books of 2019. (If discussed in earlier posts I’ve linked rather than repeat myself.)

Because of the child

One of the granddaughters, 9, came down the stairs to greet me with her hands behind her back. She was hiding Because of Winn-Dixie by Kate DiCamillo, which she wanted to give me, she said, because she’d enjoyed it and “because you love books.” Because of her, I read it immediately. It was a quick, touching read. Please don’t tell her, but she’s getting another Kate DiCamillo book for Christmas — The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, about a vain, disinterested rabbit who learns to love. The writing and illustrations are exquisite. (The best children’s books delight adults too.)

The Margaret Laurence project

This year I embarked on a project to re-read — or read, in the case of her early Africa work — Margaret Laurence, reflecting as I went. (A kind of devotional exercise, I suppose.) I’m not finished — other books keep getting in the way — but I got through This Side Jordan, The Tomorrow Tamer, The Prophet’s Camel Bell, and The Stone Angel, as well as Laurence’s letter exchanges with friend Adele Wiseman and publisher Jack McClelland. I realized again why she was such a force at a certain time in Canadian Literature, why she was formative for me as well. I hope to continue this project in 2020, and may say more about it then, but for now a bit of trivia: I discovered that Laurence wrote much of The Stone Angel in a small cottage at Point Roberts, which is just across the border from us, several kilometres away, where we sometimes walk by the water or fly kites with the grands. I don’t know why I like knowing that she worked near by, but I do.

Insights and Images

Mary Pipher’s Women Rowing North: Navigating Life’s Currents and Flourishing as We Age is a gentle, wise book about resilience in my current stage. Diana Butler Bass’s Grateful serves up insights on gratitude that go beyond personal practice (though that’s important) to public and communal gratitude — life not as quid pro quo but pro bono. The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning by Margareta Magnusson is short and humorous and also appropriate for my current stage (and better than Marie Kondo’s philosophy, especially now that she’s gone rogue with online products to further clutter one’s life.) And I loved Robert Caro’s Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing, with its stories and advice.

Giller shortlisted Lampedusa by Steven Price doesn’t have much of a plot (it’s about a man trying to finish the book that will be his legacy) but the writing is immersive. Price is a poet and it shows. For one example: “Far below the sea was a watery eggshell blue, the white sun millionfold and turning on the surface like blades.”

I read The White Bone (1998) by Barbara Gowdy this year, which I hadn’t read before, because it was chosen — by Margaret Atwood no less — as a Globe and Mail’s bookclub selection. Although I’m fond of elephants, I merely persevered with the novel. By now I shouldn’t doubt my own tastes when I don’t care for a book “everyone else” seems to adore, I wonder what’s wrong with me. But all this to say that in the midst of, and after, The White Bone, I fell into Penelope Lively’s Passing On (1989) with a kind of ardent relief. It’s about a brother sister finding their way post the death of their powerful, bossy mother. Lively is one of my favourite writers. I saw myself in: “Helen read a great deal… She read anything; she read in all directions. She read to learn and she read to experience… She became book dependent, for better or for worse.” And here too, a gorgeous image about light: “…the river gleaming below and the city reaching away in an infinite complex parade of shining white and pearly grey with light snapping from windows and cars.” Light snapping. Exactly.

People and Places I Know

Reading books by people I know, or about places I know, is doubly pleasurable, for the experience of the book itself and for the extra resonance the familiar voice or terrain provides. And, for what one learns about that known place or person. Into this category fell the fifteen 2018 books about Winnipeg I read as a juror for the Carol Shields Award early in the year and then later, Ariel Gordon’s Treed and Sally Ito’s memoir The Emperor’s Orphans. Finding Father: Stories from Mennonite Daughters was memorable for this reason too.

Intensity

Booker winner Milkman by Anna Burns is densely written, almost stream-of-consciousness, both psychologically penetrating and ominous throughout. Set during the Irish Conflict, a nameless young woman is being stalked. We feel the helplessness of that, as well as the paralysis of rumour and pressure in the community. She wants nothing more than to be left to herself, reading-while-walking, and not current books either! But, “The truth was dawning on me of how terrifying it was not to be numb, but to be aware, to have facts, retain facts, be present, be adult.”

Five Wives by Joan Thomas also felt intense, because, as it was for Thomas, the story of Operation Auca (and the death of five missionary men in 1956) was a well-known and powerful one in my childhood and youth. Although the narrative had shifted and enlarged over the years –become less mythic — I wondered whether another narrative (this one fictionalizing the five missionary women involved, which struck me as both risky and brave) would free those women or trap them again. I’m still thinking about that question. Thomas compells us with great skill into all the various places and people of the Ecuador events, creating suspense even in a story whose outcome is known from the beginning. We enter the story from various positions and from within various characters; I think her use of LIFE photographer Cornell Capa as one point of view is brilliant.

And more

The daily goings-on in a used bookstore shouldn’t be interesting, should it? In the hands of Shaun Bythell and The Diary of a Bookseller it was. The villain, of course, is Amazon, which has definitely complicated the world of bookselling.

But this post is getting much much too long! So I’ll simply close by mentioning other memorable reads of 2019. Each mention may be considered a recommendation. Dear Evelyn by Kathy Page. The Cut Out Girl by Bart van Es. Immigrant City by David Bezmozgis. Normal People by Sally Rooney. Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home by Nora Krug. Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee by Casey Cep. Another World by Pat Barker. Sweetland by Michael Crummey. River of Fire: My Spiritual Journey by Helen Prejean.

Were any of these memorable for you? What are your recommendations for me?