Last year my goal was 30 books and I read 33. This year my goal was 55 and I read 68 books — which I will admit is a bit insane. It was the mixture of always having an audiobook on the go & the pressure of starting Grad school in September motivating me to frontload my year of reading. Every book I read has a review on Goodreads (linked below). ALSO I ALWAYS WANNA CHAT BOOKS SO MESSAGE ME!

My journey to read 100 memoirs is one of witnessing all the ways to skin a cat. My #1 read was written by poet Maggie Smith & it absolutely changed my brain chemistry about the genre. It employed conventions from both playwriting and poetry & was my lightbulb I want to write something like this, moment! RuPaul’s memoir had the perfect mix of charismatic storytelling & retrospective wisdom, while Matthew McConaughey’s had a solid, enaging thematic concept and soo much heart (highly recommend listening to him read it on Spotify audiobook!). Honourable mentions: Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong & Daddy Boy by Emerson Whitney.

Even though it’s my main written genre, I slowed down on my poetry reading going into school to kinda wipe the brain-slate clean and start fresh. I read 12 collections this year. But my #1 by far was June Jordan, whose work poet friends of mine rave about. I regret not reading her work sooner — it was like stumbling upon pure gold, she writes about the violence and beauty of humanity with clarity and music. #2: Your Dazzling Death by Cass Donish was a stirring book on grief that my cohort was lucky enough to discuss and hear the author give a lecture on this semester. That night was such a special moment of vulnerable connection between us all. Reading that collection reminded me that writing is one of the bravest acts there is. #3: Clean is an award-winning book from Australian poet Scott-Patrick Mitchell about the complicated journey of addiction and the battle for sobriety. It’s a topic I’d never read about in this genre & I think definitely deserves more shine as we navigated a world where substance abuse is rampant in our cities but also in our close circles. SPM provides a framework to empathize with the struggle of the battle.

FICTION won (me) this year. While I made the mistake of taking bad recommendations from BookTok (cough, cough, A Little Life), I also read the best fiction I’ve consumed in years. Two words: TONI MORRISON. Song of Solomon is now one of my ALL-TIME most cherished reads & its protagonist Pilate, one of the most compelling fictional characters I’ve ever encountered. (Get this, she has no belly button. Have you ever heard of such a characteristic for a fictional being to possess?!) A quote from my school essay on it: “Everything is alive in Morrison’s work…In her essay The Site of Memory, Morrison outlines that sees her writing as an act of “literary archeology.” She begins at the site of an image (the remains) and excavates it to “reconstruct the world that the remains imply.” She says it's her “reliance on the image – on the remains – in addition to recollection, to yield up a kind of a truth.” Additionally, she views her duty to write and write in a way that centers the interior life of her characters as an ethical one; an inherited responsibility to her ancestors, who were “seldom invited to participate in the discourse even when we were its topic.” I could yap for hours about this book so pick it up and HIT ME UP so we can yap together.

This doesn’t leave me with much of your attention span to talk about #2 & #3, but I wrote about Veronica by Mary Gaitskill in an -ings earlier this year and you only have to Google Demon Copperhead to see the litany of awards and praise its amassed. It’s the only long book I’ve read this year that I didn’t begrudge the length of. The premise of it is a modern retelling of Charles Dickens tale set in Southern Appalachia. Kingsolver shines a light on a demographic whose stories are rarely told with sincerity and humour. Beautiful in every way.

Next year, I’m setting my goal at 40 books, choosing verrrry carefully and giving myself permission to give up on books that don’t grip me within the first 50 pages. Got any recommendations for me??

“At night, stray days come up underneath our house and lick our leaking pipes.”

“That was the year Hunca Bubba changed his name.”

These are the first lines of my favourite week of assigned readings wherein we examined Voice. The first is from ‘Strays’ by Mark Richards and the second story was called ‘Gorilla my Love’ by Toni Cade Bambara. To me they were about the sincerity of children to hold the world accountable to what they say they’ll do.

My professor argues that first lines contain the DNA of a story, that they’re the door to the portal and thus tell us where we’re going. So we discussed them extensively.

Richard’s first line is incredibly knowledge-bearing. It tell us: this is an occurrence that happens continuous “at night” as in every night. It clues us into the rural setting and the decaying nature of the narrator’s living environment, and thus their class. It also turns on our ears in the very sonic way it is composed.

Bambara’s first line being phrased in first-person retrospective, gives space for a reflective mood that also allows for a movement through tense once we progress through the exposition. She lights our curiosity through the voice of someone young, someone unable to pronounce “Uncle” and thus says “Hunca.”

Both of the voices in these pieces make use of idiolect. Idiolect is distinct from dialect, a version of language spoken by a group of people, it pertains to a particular person who speaks a specific way at a specific time.

The Voice in these pieces really sobered me. They got me thinking that childhood really ends when us adults convince kids that they should give up on their sense of justice, that they should stop pointing out hypocrisy and just live with disappointment and low expectations like the rest of us.

These Voices pushed me to see the world anew and consider telling (and seeing) stories from their perspective sometimes.

“But in our hearts, we are lone and lonesome.” — Strays

“And now I’m just really furious cause I get so tired grownups messin over kids just cause they little and can’t take em to court.” — Gorilla, My Love

Consider this my official apology to the Victorian girlies, Charlotte, Emily, Jane, Virginia.

I read many of your books when I was a teenager, when I didn’t know any better than to believe all the ‘must-read’ Classic books were written by white British women. When I got to university and started reading more diversely, I held it against you, and hadn’t returned to another Victorian-era book since.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf was the first book from this era I’ve read since being a teenage girl. And to read it now, as a grown woman, wow did it move me. It single-handedly recalibrated my perspective on Victorian writers.

While I previously criticized the wordiness Austen and Woolf are inclined to, I see now how deep and essential that verbosity is. The wonder of this text is that it gives COMPLETE and full reign to the minds and emotions of women, three different women. That's something I cannot think of the last time I've encountered in MODERN fiction.

The way that Woolf allows her female characters to so genteely grapple with their own gender and how that implicates them in their family and social structures is a feat. The concluding chapter of the book was as evocative as any Van Gogh painting.

The premise of the story is that one of the Ramsay children desperately want to go to the lighthouse. Mr Ramsay is a bit of a killjoy, and puts off this request until the dying pages of the story.

They finally take the voyage, and Woolf crafts an incredible chapter where Mr. Ramsay’s daughter Cam fully deconstructs her father's entire identity and her relationship to him, while the men on the boat are focused on fishing and sailing in the bay.

The book ends with an umarried young woman and neighbour of the family, Lily Briscoe, on the shore, painting, doing the same thing deconstruction from a distance while she completes her artwork, the last lines reading: Quickly, as if she were recalled by something over there, she turned to her canvas. There it was—her picture. Yes, with all its greens and blues, its lines running up and across, its attempt at something. It would be hung in the attics, she thought; it would be destroyed. But what did that matter? she asked herself, taking up her brush again. She looked at the steps; they were empty; she looked at her canvas; it was blurred. With a sudden intensity, as if she saw it clear for a second, she drew a line there, in the centre. It was done; it was finished. Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.

Contrasting this text with the only other book I read this month, Animal by Lisa Taddeo, draws an interesting insight into how feminism presents in two distinct eras.

Animal is a disturbing tale that follows Joan, a young woman whose ex-lover, a wealthy, married man with whom she was having an affair, commits suicide in front of her in a public place out of heartbreak. The storyline then backtracks through her life to explain the various circumstances that led to that incident. It’s a NYT #1 bestseller and describes as an “electrifying” novel about female rage at its rawest. It’s actually described as an “one woman’s exhilirating transformation from prey to predator.” Sigh…

Throughout the novel, Joan lives out her childhood trauma again and again with different men, and no effort is made to redress it. The author chooses instead to worsen and deepen the damage done to her body and her attitudes toward sex, intimacy and men. Eventually culminating in the cold-blooded murder of another man who she might have had the healthiest relationship with of all the people in her life?

I fear that we are confusing sexual recklessness with sexual empowerment. I’m really wondering what texts like this do for the cause of gender equality, and why the women that make books like this a bestseller, don’t recognize the harm being done.

After reading two flops (A Little Life & The Great Believers) in a month, I’ve begun being more careful with my book selections. Life is too short to read bad books! I’ve stopped forcing it if I don’t get hooked instantly. This has led me to an amazing reading month! I found two books I really love & would re-read, for much of the same reason - and funnily enough they both happen to involve a Veronica.

The first is translated work from Italian called, Lost On Me by Veronica Raimo, that my good friend S.D recommended and has a forthcoming review at the Washington Square Review coming out soon. It’s a bizzare work of autofiction, where the author admits things you couldn’t pay me to tell anyone. But that’s why I loved it, it plunges fully into indecent topics and uncomfortable confessions across Raimo’s entire life without the slightest inclination of self-consciousness. I marvelled at the accomplishment of its honesty the whole way through — didn’t hurt that it was highly entertaining, full of romantic hijinks and scathing opinions on the author’s neurotic mother and duplicitous father.

Similarly, Veronica by Mary Gaitskill, had such a sincerity to it. It’s a story of a two young women, plagued by the consequences of their immature decisions, who find each other at their life’s climax and share in the mountaintop and fall together. The narrator was so entrancing to see the world through. Like in Raimo’s work of auto-fiction, she did something so rare not just in literature but in life, she did not impose judgement on anyone in her life, or on herself. Gaitskill is an incredible fiction writer that seems to balance attention to content and form effortlessly & I’m genuinely committing to read everything she’s ever written after this! See the stunning quote below.

From Veronica, by Mary Gaitskill: "I wanted something to happen, but I didn’t know what. I didn’t have the ambition to be an important person, or a star. My ambition was to live like music. I didn’t think of it that way, but that’s what I wanted, it seems like that’s what everybody wanted. I remember people walking around as if they were wrapped in an invisible gauze of songs, one running into the next. Songs about sex, pain, injustice, love, triumph. Each song bursting with ideal characters that popped out and fell back as the person walked down the street or rode the bus.”

I read it in two days and haven’t stopped thinking about it since. It’s a Memoir that takes place in rural Idaho and follows the author’s childhood, living in a home guided by parents that didn’t believe in sending their children to school or the hospital. The author Tara Westover, was working on a junkyard sorting sharp metals at age ten; she didn’t even have a birth certificate until the year prior to that.

Westover tends to the characterization of her fundamentalist parents and siblings with so much grace and humanity, in doing so she captures the complexity of human nature better than any non-fiction I’ve ever read.

The narration was so beautifully crafted, it transported me so profoundly that I completely forgot at times that it wasn’t happening to me and also that it wasn’t fictional - which makes it all the more astounding. The only criticism I've seen of this book I think is its greatest strength. It doesn't seek to appraise any of the occurrences or people within it from any perspective except the young girl who experienced it. Be warned that it is a heavy read, with inclusions of abuse and injuries that occurred during her upbringing.

At its heart, it is a story about and for people searching for a way to love themselves when the people they love most in the world give them only fuel to hate and doubt their own worth.

Ocean Vuong is my favourite poet and because I love him so much, I’ve waited quite a while to read this Novel. I was pretty sure that when I did eventually read it, it would become my favourite book. I was right.

Just like in his poetry, Ocean uses language and form to transport. The narrator, Little Dog, discloses in the opening lines that they are “writing to go back to time.” The entire novel follows consistently, but never monotonously, from that premise. Paragraphs rhythmically begin with prepositions that position the reader in differing epochs, during Little Dog’s life and before it – episodes from his mother and grandmother’s life in Vietnam before, during and after the War. The plot is not chronological, but it is fluid and fluent in the language of memory.

Through this letter to his mother, the narrator pushes back on our tendency to taxidermy the deceased; to petrify them in a death initiated by the end of their earthly dialogue with us.

Instead, he manifests the movement that legacy and loss realistically assumes, and in doing so offers us a new way to grieve those whose physical presence we may not currently enjoy. He disproves the idea that death ends the conversation that is the relationships we hold most dear to us in our lives.

A master of story-telling tapestries, Ocean Vuong utilizes analogy like no other; weaving novel-long analogies seamlessly through Monarch butterflies, Tiger Woods, poetic elegy, geological formations, cultural histories and a multitude of translations to reveal the beautiful interconnected lens that he sees the world through.

“I am writing because they told me to never start a sentence with because. But I wasn’t trying to make a sentence – I was trying to break free. Because freedom, I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and the prey.”

“What is a country but a borderless sentence, a life?”

“What is a country but a life sentence?”