March 14, 2025
All the Days and Nights, by William Maxwell
My first William Maxwell was his novel The Chateau, which I read a couple of years ago in a reading group all about books about houses that Anne Fernald ran online via the Center for Fiction, and that book was the perfect introduction to Maxwell, who published six novels between the 1930s and 1980s, along with many short stories, and also was fiction editor of The New Yorker from 1936 to 1975. Maxwell is the most Woolf-influenced male author I’ve ever encountered, and The Chateau made that clear, although not as clear as his second novel They Came Like Swallows, whose structure borrows much from To the Lighthouse and which is based on Maxwell’s mother’s death in the 1918 flu epidemic. It’s a biographical thread he picks up again and again his fiction, including in the short stories collected in All The Days and Nights, which makes for a strange and emotional experience for readers familiar with his preoccupations—unlike his characters, we know what’s coming, and yet haplessly hoping for some other outcome all the same. There’s something so vulnerable and real about Maxwell’s characters, their flaws and imperfections. He’s the only mid-twentieth century author I’ve ever read whose male characters struggle with infertility, which was also based on Maxwell’s own experience, and the way he writes about love and marriage is so tender and moving and honest. He writes about people at the mercy of fate, and I really love his work. So very much that I even read the entirety of his collected stories, which is a big deal. Big doorstop collected stories are nice to have, I guess, but not great for reading, and the only one I’ve ever successfully completed is Grace Paley, and she didn’t even write that much. Poor John Cheever’s collection just sat gathering dust on my bookshelf for years until I finally gave up the ghost, and got rid of it. But William Maxwell! I read the whole thing, and it was really great.
March 10, 2025
Women Who Woke Up the Law, by Karin Wells
Karin Wells’ Women Who Woke Up the Law is hardly a feel-good book—it tells the stories of women who had to fight for very little, and often didn’t even get it—but it made me feel good anyway. Not because of good triumphing over evil, because in the end justice prevails, nope, not that at all. But instead because it tells the stories of women (and their lawyers, many of whom were also women) who nevertheless persisted, planting seeds that might take decades to grow, if ever, stories of the incremental pace of progress (along with requisite setbacks). Progress is not inevitable, as we’ve never learned in starker clarity than we’re learning right now as decades of progress are ripped apart and there are even people cheering for it. But progress is still possible, and it takes courage, and grit, and the work of it is hard and often unrewarding. And yet.
Wells, whose previous works instead one of my favourite books about Canadian history, The Abortion Caravan, once again brings the past to life with Women Who Woke Up the Law, each chapter telling the stories of the women behind fundamental changes to Canadian law. These include Eliza Campbell, whose gravestone at Mount Pleasant Cemetery still proclaims “I Did NOT Commit Adultery,” after she was accused by her husband, and fought valiantly for her reputation (and alimony), leading to eventual changes to Canadian divorce law. Also Emily Murphy, the first female magistrate in the British empire, “a complicated and dubious feminist icon,” who was part of a push to give women a share of their husband’s estates. Florence Murdoch, a ranch wife and survivor of brutal spousal abuse (she was beaten so hard to had to have her jaw wired shut) who fought for a portion of the ranch she’d put years of work into, though the Supreme Court of Canada would declare her not eligible, that her “twenty-five years of cutting hay, moving, dehorning, vaccinating and driving cattle… ‘was the work done by any ranch wife.'”
Wells shares stories of women whose courage helped to slowly move the needle on consent laws; of a woman who fought the system for unemployment insurance when she left work to have a baby (judges that argued that women could not be victims of sexual discrimination because in order for there to be discrimination, men and women would have to be equal, which they were not); of Jeannette Corbiere Lavell who fought to keep her Indigenous status after she married a non-Indigenous man (Indigenous men did not suffer such a penalty when they married non-Indigenous women); Chantale Diagle whose abusive partner tried to prevent her from accessing an abortion in the 1980s; Jane Hurshman who killed her sadistic partner after years of abuse and would go on to speak publicly about domestic violence; and Viola Desmond and Rachael Baylis, two Black Canadian women who, decades apart, would help to bring intersectionality in legal parlance. And so many more ordinary extraordinary lives.
As with her previous books, Wells is skilled at pulling threads and making connections, weaving these wide-ranging tales into a fascinating tapestry.
March 7, 2025
A Jest of God, by Margaret Laurence
Of all the books in Margaret Laurence’s Manawaka cycle, A Jest of God is the one that made the faintest impression on me, resonating mostly because Rachel, its protagonist, was Stacey Cameron’s elder sister. Stacey from The Fire Dwellers, the Laurence book that meant the most to me, I think, because of its preoccupation with the domestic and the kind of female life I understood. Stacey is a wife, a mother, which gives her a kind of legitimacy Rachel even acknowledges in A Jest of God, in comparison with her own experience—she still lives with her mother in Manawaka, didn’t complete university, teaches Grade 2 in the very classroom she’d attended as a child. Much like Hagar in The Stone Angel (which I reread recently, and failed to love), Rachel lives invisibly, a small and quiet life that is making her crazy. It’s the kind of life that, like that of an elderly woman, I would have scarcely acknowledged as a younger reader. It occurs to me that Laurence writes the gradients of female experience that I was too far away to see at the time, the way I’d thought of Hagar Shipley and Morag Gunn as just two old broads, never mind that there are forty years and a whole lot more between them. The way that I never saw Rachel at all.
Rachel is an easier person to share a stream of consciousness than Hagar was. She has similar pride and fear of being vulnerable, but it not quite so unwavering about it. Her hard shell is not her most defining feature. She’s also 60 years younger and still knows what’s what, a little bit savvy, a little bit willing to strike out and try. During the summer in which the novel takes place, she starts seeing an old classmate whose back in town for the season, and allows herself to fall into a fantasy of a future for them as a couple. He takes her out into the countryside and lays down a blanket so they can have sex without worrying about thistles and brambles, which might be the most care any man has ever shown Rachel ever. Although it’s not doing to end well, the reader realizes. That Nick Kazlik is never going to be driving Rachel Cameron’s getaway car, that she’s going to have to find a way to change her life on her own—and she does. The ending of this book (and there’s a whole lot more going on, particularly the biblical allegory that’s inaccessible to me) is really a triumph. I’m grateful for the chance to return to this one again.
March 4, 2025
One Day Everyone Will Have Been Against This, by Omar El Akkad
“It is very important to do the right thing, eventually,” writes Omar El Akkad near the end of his new book, One Day Everybody Will Always Have Been Against This, a book which, if/when I post an image of its cover on social media, will make some people angry and disappointed with me. “Eventually” the word on which El Akkad’s sentence hinges, tying back to his title, which comes from a tweet he posted on October 25, 2023, three weeks into Israel’s bombardment of Gaza.
Two weeks before that, I’d reposted an Instagram story about an Israeli rocket hitting the Al-Ahli Arab Hospital, and then took it down after doubt was cast about the rocket’s origins. It is very important to do the right thing right now, I thought, to be cautious and responsible, verifying facts, not to spread misinformation. I took down the post. (In a January 3, 2025 release from the United Nations, after Israel’s December 27 attach on the last functioning hospital on North Gaza, a medical worker reports that “that wearing scrubs and white coats is like wearing a target on their backs.” At that date, the WHO had verified 654 attacks on healthcare facilities in Gaza.)
At a certain point, I pretty much stopped reposting stories about Gaza. Which is not silence, or violence. It is very important to do the right thing, so I must tell you that I continued to write about it in my own words, on my blog and in social media posts, but I was wary of the reposts, of just what I was doing with that project. Who was I talking to? Was it the people in my own community who are stranding up for Palestinian freedom, needing them to know that I too was on the right side? Was it those in my circles who put up Israeli flags on their accounts on October 7, wishing I could follow up and ask them how they felt about that? Or those people I love who fly no flags at all but whose relationship to Israel is ambivalent, complicated?
There really are some parts of this story which are allowed to be complicated. And one of these is two sides insisting on their moral clarity. Sharpie debates scrawled on utility poles around my neighbourhood and all over the garbage can at the subway entrance. Dueling sound systems turned up to full blast. Members of my community being drawn into a right-wing media-sphere full of outright lies and fear-mongering. Rifts in the Canadian literary community that have hurt many quiet people deeply, whether I think those feelings justified or not. And yes, the endless focus (locally at least) on people’s feelings while bodies are being blown apart, the trouble of feelings being the focal point we keep returning to. That some lives get to be mourned and others collateral damage. So much noise.
But in his new book, El Akkad, who was born in Egypt, grew up in Qatar and Canada, and was awarded the 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize for his novel What Strange Paradise, cuts through all of it to create something most essential, to show the hypocrisy at the core of Western Liberalism as the world does nothing while tens of thousands of Gazans are brutalized, murdered. He writes, “There exists no remotely plausible explanation for a moral worldview in which what a protester might hypothetically do to a hospital [in Toronto] deserves the strongest condemnation, while what a military does—has done—to multiple hospitals deserves none.”
This is not only a failure toward the people of Gaza, it’s a failure to ourselves, to the moral foundation we purport to stand on. El Akkad writes, “Of all the epitaphs that may one day be written on the gravestone of Western liberalism, the most damning is this: Faced off against a nihilistic, endlessly cruel manifestation of conservatism, and someone managed to make it close.”
I don’t think this is a book to be debated, to be countered in the back-and-forth manner of the garbage can sharpie debates (which, I will tell you, have failed to yet add an original element to the conversation or change anybody’s mind). This is a deeply thoughtful and considered book that needs to be understood more than it needs to be agreed with or dismissed altogether. It’s the story of El Akkad’s falling out of the love with Empire, with the Western project that so enticed him as a young person growing up in the Middle East where freedom was curtailed and corruption reigned, a promise of something better, but which has again and again failed to live up to that promise.
He is done with it. He writes, “Everywhere there is a great rage simmering, boiling over, and everything feels like an argument. But there are no arguments to be had anymore.”
February 27, 2025
Moon Honey, by Suzette Mayr
27 years before she won the Giller Prize for her novel The Sleeping Car Porter, Suzette Mayr released her debut novel, Moon Honey, a book that begins with a young white couple, Carmen and Griffin, having sex under a pool table in Griffin’s parents’ basement, the third time they’ve ever done it, and in the midst of things Carmen smacks her head on the table leg, passing out for about a minute, but Griffin doesn’t notice. Griffin doesn’t notice much, barely reacting at all when, not long after the pool table incident, Carmen is transformed into a Black woman, except to find the premise sexually exciting. His mother, Fran, on the other hand, who never liked Carmen in the first place, is almost relieved to have her virulent racism as a hook on which to hang her dislike for her son’s partner, but doesn’t have time to be comfortable there before she has her own transformation, part of a maternal legacy. Such metamorphoses punctuating the book—a bridesmaid who turns into a horse the bride rides out on, another bride who turns into a LITERAL asshole. Anything can happen in Moon Honey, limits to be pressed like luck, and the result is wild and rollicking magic. Out now in a brand new edition from from NeWest Press.
February 21, 2025
Anastasia Krupnik
My family is reading The Iliad aloud (turns out we’re Homer completists; after reading Emily Wilson’s The Odyssey a few years back, it only seemed natural) but nobody is enjoying it. It’s as boring, bloody, and stagnate as the Trojan War, and then when my kids found out the horse wasn’t even in it, they were furious. I’m not ready to give up on The Iliad yet, however, and so we’re interspersing its books with lighter and more satisfying fare, which most recently was Lois Lowry’s novel Anastasia Krupnik, the first title in her series about the quirky daughter of a poet and a painter growing up in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
I bought an Anastasia boxed set for my children a few years ago (tragically, does not currently seem available!), and while we’ve since read Books 2-4 all aloud and absolutely loved them, I hadn’t read them the first book yet—it’s a bit different, set when Anastasia was only 10, before she moved into her tower bedroom in the suburbs and her little brother, Sam, was born. In my mind it was more idiosyncratic than the other titles, and maybe that’s true, but now I’m not sure why I held back at all, because it’s just as great, maybe even more so, and it turns out it might also be my own personal urtext.
There were so many things in this book that I thought were MY things. Like when Anastasia (when she’s going through her wanting to be Catholic stage) makes the sign of the cross while thinking to herself “Forehead. Belly button. Left nipple. Right nipple.” And having a beloved wart. (RIP the wart on my finger that fell of when I was 24.) Being a list-maker. And maybe even living in the kind of household where children do precocious things like be read The Iliad (which doesn’t happen in this book, but I feel like it could…)
February 18, 2025
Slow Horses, by Mick Herron
Twice in the past 24 hours, the first time with a stranger while riding the subway and the second with my doctor while I was having an ultrasound on my neck, have I found myself enthusing about Slow Horses, the mystery series by Mick Herron that’s been turned into an acclaimed series on Apple TV, and about how the character played by Gary Oldman in the show (Jackson Lamb) is always farting. I absolutely love this in our age of fragmented culture, and wonder who I’ll be discussion Lamb’s flatulence with tomorrow.
Possibly I’m failing to impress upon you how good these books are…
Unlike those I was talking to, I haven’t seen the show, but did spend a cozy snowstorm long weekend with the first book in the series, which I loved. (My husband is currently reading Dead Lions, the second book, and he’s enjoying that one too.) It’s a novel about spies whose mistakes and misadventures have sent them to Slough House, the place where misfit MI5 agents go to die (and hence the name for them, the Slow Horses)…until a high profile kidnapping case ends up in their lap. Jackson Lamb is their most uninspiring boss whose faith in them is nil. And yet.
What struck me most about Slow Horses—in addition to it being quite gripping—was its prescience. Published in 2010, and including a narrative thread about a Boris Johnson-esque figure with his eye on Number 10, the idea of far-right racist views being held by mainstream figures might have seemed far fetched at the time, but not so much now. After a massive cock-up, Slow Horse River Cartwright has only managed to stay in MI5 because of his grandfather, a former agent, who, when the two are discussing a journalist exposed for gross racist and nationalist views, explains to him that “[the journalist] wasn’t excommunicated because of his beliefs. It was because there are certain beliefs you’re supposed to keep under wraps if you want to dine at the High Table.” Which, in light of the capitulation of so many (powerful) people to the current US administration’s terrifying authoritarian agenda, seems awfully true, and they’re not even hiding anymore.
February 16, 2025
How We Learn to Be Brave, by Mariann Edgar Budde
This is a really beautiful book, so rich, honest, and generous. I bought it as a gesture of support and solidarity, but wasn’t sure—as someone without religion—how much I’d connect with it, but I appreciated its lessons so much and found them really buoying.
February 12, 2025
The Box Garden, by Carol Shields
Expectations weren’t huge for my reread of Carol Shields’ sophomore novel, THE BOX GARDEN. As I mentioned in my January essay about my 2025 reading projects (rereading the works of Carol Shields is one of them!), I recalled her noting somewhere that she regretted the overwrought plotting of the book (there is a high stakes element near the end that seems incongruous with the tension of the rest of the novel). I’d also been underwhelmed upon my most recent read of her first novel, SMALL CEREMONIES, which I’d really admired when I first read it a while back, but whose plot is almost UNDERwrought, its flimsiness apparent as I now knew all the twists and turns and there was not much to the story that was left after that (except that this is a Carol Shields, book, so even the dust motes are magic, which I need to say, because strangers keep leaving scolding comments admonishing me for my audacity to critique the works of beloved writers. I will add that part of really loving a writer and engaging with their work is reading with a clear eye, being able to understand what works and what doesn’t, and also it’s just a more interesting way for me to read.)
The Box Garden made no impression on me when I read it before. A search on my blog reveals that I never wrote about it, except for a reference to a review by Barbara Amiel who’d said that this book and others like it, with their focuses on the lives of ordinary people, “will be the undoing of contemporary literature,” and—as she was about many things—Barbara Amiel was wrong about that. I suspect that this story—about a woman approaching her forties, considering her divorce, single motherhood, reflecting on her relationship with her own mother as she travels from her home in Vancouver to her mother’s suburban bungalow in Scarborough, Ontario, for her mother’s unexpected wedding, thinking about mid-life, about old age—didn’t resonate with me when I was younger and didn’t properly understand how many lives a life contains, but I get it now. The mystery of how we got from there to here, Shields’ Charleen seemingly untethered from the many selves she’s been, but needing to get them all into some kind of order if she’s ever going to be ready to move forward with her life. An ordinary life is always an odyssey.
There’s also an uncanny bit of prescience in the novel, the book’s title coming from a box that Charleen receives from a somewhat mystical correspondent containing a tray, a bag of earth, and some grass seed. According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the first known use of the expression “touch grass” was in 2016, an expression that’s about connecting with a tangible reality (as opposed to being on the internet), but in 1977, Shields was writing about it literally: “I…like to run my hand over its springy tightly-shaved surface, loving its tufted healthy carpet-thick threads, the way it struggles against the sides of the box, the industry with which it mends itself,” and the man who’d sent the package had been writing about the sociology of grass, he had “a theory about the importance of grass to human happiness.”
The reader is meant to find the entire project a little bit out-there, but there is also something to it, which Carol Shields always knew, even if Barbara Amiel didn’t. That life (and even literature) can be about the small scale, about the details, about the wonder inherent in something as simple as grass, regarded blade by blade
February 5, 2025
It Must Be Beautiful to Be Finished, by Kate Gies
Before her second surgery at age five (there would be 14 surgeries in total), Kate Gies had learned to somersault, somersaulting becoming her preferred mode of transport at home: “Bend, tuck head to chest, pull forward, and roll! Like a wheel!” But after the surgery—during which a plastic ear was inserted under grafted skin; Gies was born without a right ear and this replacement would be cosmetic only—she would experience pain from motion as simple as moving her head to one side in her sleep, so there would be no more somersaults. The plastic ear wouldn’t take either, and doctors’ further attempts to deliver on promises of building her ear would be far from straightforward, until finally—at age 14—Gies put a stop to all of it, deciding she preferred living in her body as it was, rather than trying to have two ears, rather than trying to be what she calls, “The Kate I’m Supposed to Be.”
Although that is not the end of the story, the trajectory not so simple, not least of all because Gies is hearing impaired (she has no hearing where she has no ear [obviously!], and her hearing on the other side was compromised following a punctured eardrum from one of many surgeries gone wrong), but spends the next 20 years not considering her disability and the need for accommodation. Instead, “[m]y problem had always been perceived as the physical deformity of the missing ear. Its form was the problem, not its function: what I looked like, not the ease with which I took in an navigated the world.”
The catalyst for Gies’ memoir, IT MUST BE BEAUTIFUL TO BE FINISHED, is the discovery of a lesion on her right earlobe, the earlobe constructed from tissue from her stomach during those childhood surgeries, the ear that she never thinks about, doesn’t touch, disassociated from this part of her body, and still traumatized from the brutal medical procedures she’d suffered during the years doctors spent trying to make her complete. The memoir documents her movement toward finally the facing the reality of her body and of her history full, a journey told in vignettes and fragments from the past.
The fragmented structure of the memoir is emotionally helpful for the reader, because reading it is such a visceral and wrenching experience, and the story in pieces makes that easier. It’s also how memory works, flashes and splinters, and Gies’s memoir is a fascinating exercise in reconstructing history too, the writing including excerpts from her medical records and also feedback from Gies’s mother upon hearing what she’d written, offering corrections and extra insight, her own pivotal point of view. (Gies recalls her mother being extra cheerful before her surgeries at The Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto; her mother tells her how once Gies had been delivered to surgery, she’d have to find a place to cry.)
In addition to Gies herself, who appears to have been born with her somersaulting spirit fully formed, her mother emerges as the hero of this book, standing up for her daughter within a system that offered them very little agency, setting the kind of example that likely empowered Gies to eventually declare herself finished with surgeries—a decision her mother never questioned. Their back-and-forths are one of the most moving parts of this book, her mother’s honest self-criticism, Gies’ generosity in imagining herself into her mother’s perspective in the most stunning and powerful fashion. (I think it was because I was able to relate so strongly to both characters that I found reading this book so incredibly moving, in a way that was sometimes painful, but also a gorgeous testament to what writing can do.)
In telling the story of her own experience in an ableist and misogynist medical system, Gies illuminates broader truths about what it means to have a body, to live with difference, and learn to finally feel at home within one’s skin. I loved this book so much.
