January 20, 2026

Sharing the Light, by Monique Gray Smith

I think it’s because I already know her light that Monique Gray Smith’s Sharing the Light: Stories and Reflections means a little more to me to me than it might have otherwise. Having personally received its brilliant warmth, I can attest to the goodness—though that stunning cover would have attracted my attention all the same.

In November 2019, after her picture book My Heart Fills With Happiness was selected for the TD Grade One Giveaway and distributed to students across Canada, including my daughter, which I posted about on social media, Smith DM’d me to say she would be visiting Toronto to receive an award from the First Nations Community Reads Awards program, and she wondered if she could squeeze in a visit to my daughter’s school, the response from me and the school and everybody an emphatic YES, PLEASE. And what transpired was the most beautiful gathering, Smith sharing her light in the most gorgeous and generous way, the kind of togetherness whose loss I so grieved as the pandemic began not long after, and my children didn’t go to school for a long time.

And then sometime during that sad pandemic year, Smith created a short podcast series called “Love is Medicine,” whose message I clung to as I dealt with my own anxiety and grief about what we were all experiencing, and it helped me so much, such a counter to the messages of doom and gloom that were permeating my consciousness from everywhere else. Instead, with calm and kindness, and born from her own experiences of overcoming adversity, Smith told a different kind of story, one of quiet strength, persistence, possibility, and the hope that is found when we connect to each other.

These same messages are what Smith conveys in Sharing the Light, a book that seems very simple on its surface (some of its pages have just a handful of words), but which is quietly profound, and brave, and not without its twists (the part where she drives 150 miles an hour around a race track!!). Smith writes about gratitude, love, joy, happiness, and hope, about the power and abundance of these elements, and how the simple act of paying attention to them can strengthen our hearts and transform our lives, even in the most difficult of winters.

January 19, 2026

Dangerous Memory: Coming of Age in the Decade of Greed, by Charlie Angus

That the 1980s never really ended, as Charlie Angus argues in his memoir Dangerous Memory: Coming of Age in the Decade of Greed, has been remarkably clear than in the last couple of weeks with unrest in Iran, American interference in Central America, ongoing turmoil in Afghanistan, and dangerous bluster and violence on the part of the not-so-super superpowers, America and Russia. And the 1980s were where the race to the bottom began, with governments in the US, UK, and Canada selling off public resources, corporate raiders dismantling profitable companies, and good jobs being shipped overseas to where wages were much lower, the labour movement left much reduced in power and workers paid the price.

But that wasn’t all, Angus notes, his notes sociological study blended with personal biography as he shares his own experiences in a punk band and as an activist during that tumultuous decade (as well as his later experiences as a Canadian Member of Parliament). The “decade of greed” was also a powerful era of people power, where social movements led to incredible change that no one would have seen coming at the beginning of the decade—the fall of the Soviet Union, great strides to protect the environment, movement toward nuclear disarmament. These are what Angus (borrowing the phrase from theology professor Candace McLean) calls “dangerous memories,” dangerous to those in power for how they are also the seeds of hope and resistance.

Like John Ganz’s acclaimed When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, Angus’s Dangerous Memory connects the dots and fills in the blanks as to how we got from there to here—the 1990s, he writes, was when “we pissed it all away. Angus addresses international politics, the attack on labour, the drug crisis, homelessness, the AIDs epidemic, and so much more, using the recent past to make of the chaos of the present, and to offer a path forward toward into a different and better kind of story.

January 14, 2026

The Tenant, by M. Berry

In The Tenant, by M. Barry (a pseudonym for the writer Michelle Berry), bestselling thriller writer Amy Ellis has been unable to write anything since birth of her daughter, but hopes that her family’s year-long sojourn to Freiburg, Germany, delivers a solution to this—her husband has a contract at a non-profit there, their daughter will be enrolled in daycare, her husband’s company has secured the family with a lovely rental house. Except that the house comes with unexpected feature, a tenant, a slightly odd English woman called who’s living in the attic flat. A double booking, maybe? Eleanor is a bit vague about it, and nobody seems able to contact the landlord, and so Amy and her husband decide to just live with it. Eleanor seems harmless enough, and she begins to help out with Amy’s daughter, delivering her to and from her preschool, leaving Amy’s days free to finally write her book—a novel inspired by a series of mysterious killings that are dominating news headlines.

But the reader, of course, is privy to Eleanor’s point of view, and soon learns that the tenant is not so harmless after all. And that her presence is Amy’s rental house is part of a carefully laid out plan that Amy has no idea she is walking straight into, and that the thriller that she’s writing is actually her real life, a story with shades of Misery or The Shining.

I tore through this book in a day, and got more and more gripped as the tension ramped up. And while I can’t say that the plot was watertight—there were some holes; it was baggy in places—this was still a satisfying, riveting, and most enjoyable read.

January 14, 2026

Black Cherokee, by Antonio Michael Downing

“If casting out our Ophelias wounds us, we can only become whole by restoring them. By making room for the possibility of transcendence. Of being both. Of being beyond both.” —Antonio Michael Downing

Okay, buckle up, because Antonio Michael Downing’s Black Cherokee is a novel with a voice, a voice that conveys the story of Ophelia Blue Rivers with the swiftness and drive of the very river that runs through the town of Etsi, skirting the property belonging to Ophelia’s grandmother, Grandma Blue, who has the same name as Ophelia, the same name as the first Black baby in Etsi generations ago (but not so many generations ago). Etsi—which means “mother” in Cherokee language—is a fictional community in South Carolina, home to Black and Cherokee communities that live together, but also apart, Grandma Blue and her late husband Chief Trouthands becoming the exception to that rule when they fell in love. But after Chief Trouthands dies, the rest of the community—against Grandma Blue’s advice—is persuaded to disband, their land sold to rich white men of industry, and now the river is polluted. The story following Ophelia Blue—who is neither Black nor Cherokee, but instead half of each and “all mixed up”—from her early childhood in Etsi, to the Black church evangelical community from which she tries to find belonging, to her experiences as a student enrolled in a special program for bright Black students at an otherwise all-white high school, and finally to her life on the cusp of adulthood and autonomy as she is finally forced to take a step on her own journey, instead of one that seems set out for her on the basis of who she is or isn’t or who her family was.

Sweeping, funny, poignant, and honest, full of music and magic and butterflies, Downing’s narrative shimmers, sings, and shines, transcends and delights. A beautiful feat of imagination and possibility, I really loved this book.

January 13, 2026

The Folded Leaf, by William Maxwell

I LOVE William Maxwell, love, love, LOVE William Maxwell, whose novels are the most curious blend of realism and modernism, and who writes about men, love, and longing so very tenderly. For the last few years, I’ve read one of his novels over the winter break, but I think I’ve read his better known books and so my local secondhand bookstores were turning up nothing, and finally I couldn’t take the void and ordered a copy of his 1945 novel The Folded Leaf, a story of male friendship set in the 1920s. (What set me over the edge was the email I received from my friend Julia reading, “OMG KERRY I don’t think you impressed upon me just how brilliant and devastating THEY CAME LIKE SWALLOWS really is. oh how i loved that novel.” [I actually think that receiving such novels is the meaning of life.])

And I liked it so very much. And while I was reading it, I was THRILLED to see a Substack Note from author Brandon Taylor who was reading The Cheateau, which was my first William Maxwell book, and Taylor writes, “This novel is warm, funny, but also probing and wise and profound about surfaces, about illusions, by the yearning for meaning, about the strangeness of travel, about the mystery of human relationships. It is social, historical, but also timeless. I just loved it. LOVED IT. SO MUCH. I CANNOT STOP THINKING ABOUT IT. AMAZING BOOK.” (William Maxwell. He makes us emphatic. We can’t help it.)

He also remarks on Maxwell’s 1980 novel So Long, See You Tomorrow being way overhyped, which was interesting because it was the one novel of his that did not move me at all, but I had assumed that the problem was mine. Maxwell’s work can be a little bit difficult, usually where difficulty might not be expected, a bit strange, uncanny, and tricky to decipher in places—there were threads in The Folded Leaf I had a hard time following. I had assumed I wasn’t reading well with So Long…, but maybe it’s just not his best work. Which is fine, because his best work is so good.

The Folded Leaf is the story of two high school boys who are both misfits in their own way, and who end up being best friends, but neither of them are ever able to articulate just what their connection means to them, or what its parameters are, which means things end up being very messy and complicated as they move through the years, going off to university together, Lymie making all the grades, Spud becoming a boxing star, much to his mother’s chagrin. Where does one boy end and the other begin? The novel’s climax is brutal and devastating.

January 12, 2026

Days of Feasting and Rejoicing, by David Bergen

“It was too dangerous, and fantasy so easily descended into violence and delirium. To act, or not act. Was it that simple? What consequences would she suffer? She looked down at the hands in her lap. Oh, Esther. What will you do?”

Lines are blurred in David Bergen’s novel Days of Feasting and Rejoicing, between truth and fantasy, right and wrong, between a person and another. The novel begins in Bali where two young white women who live in Thailand are travelling, and then one of them ends up dead. The other woman, Esther Maile, flies back to Thailand on the dead woman’s passport, and continues to behave curiously, although the narrative is so firmly fixed in her twisted mind that it’s hard to see what’s really happening. Eventually Police Inspector Net Wantok’s point of view enters the story, and we see him struggling to put together the pieces of the puzzle, which become extra puzzling after the dead girl’s brother flies to Thailand to find out what happened to his sister, and he disappears. Dark, unsettling, and impeccably executed, I was totally riveted by this story, which was so deliciously disturbing.

January 5, 2026

What I Read on my Winter Vacation

Holiday break! This year I only read books by British lady writers whose pub dates span most of the 20th century. It was a pleasure!

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark: I’ve been reading a lot of Muriel Spark in the last while, and welcomed the opportunity to finally reread The Prime…, which I initially encountered in a first year university English class, and almost all of it went over my head. Muriel Spark’s work is strange, sly, and sneaky, and this slim volume is especially subtle. In all her work, there is also a religious element I don’t fully understand, so I’m always a bit unmoored when I’m reading her, but this time I was grateful to easily have a better understanding of the book. While it’s very much about girlhood, the novel’s scope is very broad and I think I personally had to be older to really understand it. It’s also funny, and brutally devastating in a vicious yet understated way that is easy to gloss over if one is not paying attention—I really wasn’t back then, or just didn’t have the right kind of antennae.

Offshore, by Penelope Fitzgerald: I have a complicated relationship with P. Fitzgerald, whose novels were off-putting upon my first encounters, and in some ways they continue to be so—I don’t read her as easily as I do other English writers. Her perspectives and framings are always just a little “off” from what I’m expecting, and there is a strangeness too that’s a little akin to Spark. But so many people I admire love her AND her books are short enough that they’re easy to reconsider, and so I’ve done so, and read them all, connecting with her through this challenge. I also connected via her wonderful biography, by Hermione Lee, which I loved—her own story is fascinating. Anyway, in December I read the novel Fonseca, by Jessica Francis Kane, a fictional telling of an experience Fitzgerald had in Mexico in 1952, and while I liked it, but didn’t love it (it was strange and a bit obscure in the same way I find Fitzgerald’s work, probably deliberately so), it did put me in the mood to reread some of her work, so I picked Offshore, set in the 1960s, about a motley crew of variously desperate people living on London canal boats—something Fitzgerald knew about, as she’d spent time raising her own children on a canal boat during some of many lean years, a situation which finally ended when the boat sunk and landed at the bottom of the Thames.

The Rector’s Wife, by Joanna Trollope: It was at this point that the themes of my winter reading became clearer—I was going to be reading about rectors, vicars, and curates well into the new year (and Bishops too!). Even Offshore had an interfering Priest, although he didn’t have a lot of impact. Also Joanna Trollope had died earlier in December, and so it was time to finally read this novel which I stole from a rental cottage the summer before last, drawn by its Pym appeal. It was very fun and rich, the story of a middle-aged woman who has delayed her own chances and dreams in order to serve her husband’s interest as a rector in a rural English community. But when he fails to get the promotion he’d been hoping for, she finally takes matters into her own hands, getting a job stocking shelves in a grocery store in order to finance their troubled youngest child’s private schooling—although it’s also more than that, setting off a cascade of events that change everything.

A Game of Hide and Seek, by Elizabeth Taylor: I don’t really have a sense of Elizabeth Taylor (the other one, who did not have violet eyes), but every time I read her, I’m surprised by her talent, and glad that I did. This one is about Harriet, the unremarkable daughter of a suffragette whose quiet life is disturbed when she falls in love with Vesey, the nephew of her mother’s friend, the flame he lights in her heart enduring even after the two are parted (they were barely together) and she finds respectability in marriage to an older man. Which means that when Vesey reappears in her life decades later, she can’t help but act on her feelings and the attraction between them, even at the risk of upsetting everything in her careful life. There’s a lot of humour in this one too (the shop where Harriet works where wages are so low that the employees feel justified spending their workdays taking care of personal needs, like doing their ironing, or waxing their upper lips). Richly textured, and full of such understated feeling, I enjoyed this one a lot.

A Few Green Leaves, by Barbara Pym: The Barbara Pym read odyssey continues, and I loved this one, her final novel, released posthumously. Pym’s novels are either set in London, or in rural villages, this one being the latter, in which a 30-something anthropologist moves into a cottage and becomes swept up in community affairs, and possibly an attraction to the widowed rector who is much occupied by local history. It’s very much about the passage of time, and there are mentions of characters from Pym’s previous novels—the formidable Esther Clovis, in particular—having died. I think this would be a weird, albeit still enjoyable, novel to pick up and start reading out of the blue, but in the context of Pym’s oeuvre, it’s very poignant and lovely.

The Little Girls, by Elizabeth Bowen: Bowen is another writer I sometimes struggle with. I’ve really enjoyed some of her novels, but found others really hard-going, almost as though they were a deliberate running of circles around their points. This one was also a little bit hard to understand, and very odd—it was her second-last novel and perhaps not wholly representative of her body of work. It was fiercely funny in places—an eccentric widow places ads in all national newspapers in order to locate two old friends with whom she’d partaken in a pact during their school days just before WW1, but also there are parts where I’m still not sure what actually happened, the story so thoroughly obfuscated, a little too much going on. It was not my favourite

The Knox Brothers, by Penelope Fitzgerald: The one book in this stack that’s not a novel, but it’s by a novelist, so it counts? I happened upon this secondhand copy of Fitzgerald’s biography of her father and uncles, and wasn’t quite sure how much I’d be interested in these men’s stories, but it turned out to be A LOT. The Knox brothers were the sons of the Bishop of Manchester and the daughter of the Bishop of Lahore, four out of six children, and were remarkable every one. The one who grew to be Penelope Fitzgerald’s father became the editor of Punch Magazine, another was a famous cryptologist in both world wars, the other two both were priests, one of whom ended up converting to Catholicism (and FINALLY this book gave me the context for the Anglo-Catholic questions that come up again and again in Barbara Pym novels where priests are continually “going over to Rome” or being suspected as such). Even more remarkable than their accomplishments and eccentricities, Fitzgerald underlines how her father and his brothers were kind and loving men, feeling people in a time where men of their class were not commonly thought to have such emotional capacity. I loved this one.

Family and Friends, by Anita Brookner: And I loved this one too, though I was wary. Some of Brookner’s novels are incredible dense, opaque, and more cerebral than anything else, but this one (which followed her Booker-winning Hotel Du Lac in 1984) seems to be the exception to the rule. Not cerebral in the slightest, it begins with a family photograph and glosses across the surface of that family’s history across decades as things are ever-changing and nothing ever quite unfolding as expected. Fast, sweeping, and engaging, this turns into a remarkable portrait of seemingly ordinary people, highlighting the less flattering aspects of its characters. Playful and surprising, this one as a pleasure.

Whose Body, by Dorothy L. Sayers: I wasn’t planning on reading Sayers, except then I watched Wake Up, Dead Man, the new “Knives Out” movie, and this novel is referenced (and also Penelope Fitzgerald’s priest uncle Ronnie Knox was also a detective novelist and contemporary of Sayers—they were both members of The Detection Club, along with Agatha Christie, and others). I came to Sayers and Peter Wimsey via Harriet Vane, and was sort of uninterested in reading any of Sayers books in which Vane doesn’t feature (which was most of them) but getting to know Wimsey and his vulnerabilities (he’s suffering from shell shock in the early ’20s; his mother admits it might be too much to ask someone to get over a war in just a year or two) was fascinating. The mystery was satisfying and not too convoluted, although the antisemitism was unpalatable, though at least it was mostly displayed by the novels villains, but still.

The Life of Violet, by Virginia Woolf: This little book is a collection of three short stories written by Woolf when she was still Virginia Stephen, back in 1908. This work had previously been regarded as unimportant, but then a polished draft was discovered, resulting in this publication of these three fables inspired by the life of Woolf’s friend Violet Dickinson. Dreamy, funny, and whimsical, the stories are also remarkable for how they feature elements that would continue to preoccupy Woolf’s creative work—biography, rooms of one’s own, the lives of women—for the rest of her career.

An Unsuitable Attachment, by Barbara Pym: My Pym reread is nearly complete! This was an earlier Pym novel that remained unpublished until after her death, and lacks the (even unplumbed) depth of her later work, but is still very charming, and it was kind of amazing to read back into the past in order to see Esther Clovis resurrected!! This is one of Pym’s urban London parish books, complete with a sojourn to Rome. There is a librarian, a pampered cat, a lugubrious vicar’s wife, chicken in aspic, an anthropologist, and a bedraggled beatnik—what more could a reader want?

Pack of Cards, by Penelope Lively: And I am so THRILLED to be loving this book as much I am, because it’s a pretty big commitment—more than 30 stories by Penelope Lively published in one volume in North America after her Booker win for Moon Tiger in 1987. (It includes the contents of her first two story collections and nine new stories). Fortunately, the stories are wonderful, and I’m gobbling them up—I’m nearly two thirds through now. I don’t think I’ve ever read her short fiction before, but it’s just reminded of what a wonderful writer she is, and now I want to reread the huge stack of her novels that I own, most of which I’ve not read in years.

December 11, 2025

Castaway

“But I don’t know if you can write a book. I don’t know if I can write a book. I don’t know if I can write THIS book… A writing life, I’ve come to believe, is a yearslong process of casting away everything you once believed for sure.”

New nonfiction from Elizabeth McCracken, A LONG GAME: NOTES OF WRITING FICTION. As wonderful to read as any book by Elizabeth McCracken. I loved it so much. The least annoying book on craft you’ll ever encounter. Or maybe it’s just me, and how much I identify when she writes “(The subtext of all my writing is LOVE ME.)”

December 9, 2025

Do Admit: The Mitford Sisters and Me, by Mimi Pond

My own Mitford history began more than 20 years ago when I lived in England and read Mary Lovell’s biography, The Mitford Girls, launching an infatuation that would lead to many more books (the collected letters, the sisters’ own books [but not Diana’s, yikes, a bridge too far], and a pilgrimmage by coach to Chatsworth House once when I was actually quite ill and would end up lying down among the the sheep poo.

The obsession has worn off in recent years—does one need to be young to be dazzled by Mitfords? Perhaps!—but Mimi Pond’s exquisite graphic biography/memoir DO ADMIT: THE MITFORD SISTERS AND ME takes me right back there. To discovering the wonders of their story with all the twists and tragedy; the charm of English aristocratic eccentricity (from a distance, at least); the way they were like The Spice Girls or Little Women in their suggestion of a range of characters available to girls (the rural one! The fascist one!); the compelling nature of their own self-mythology (the nicknames! the lore!); the idea of women with their own agency (for better and for worse!) and suggestion that a woman’s place in history matters.

Pond brings the storied sisters to live in her exuberant illustrations, and weaves their own stories in with her own as a teen growing up in 1960s’ California, ever so far from the storied world of the Mitfords, and the real question is just why they meant so much to her, somebody whose life would never be remotely like theirs. But for Pond, like me, and so many others, it was the promise they offered of the various ways a woman’s life could go, some more sordid than others (Diana spent WWII in the Holloway Prison for Women due to her fascist tendencies, and she wasn’t even the Mitford most primed in that direction!), all of them unfailingly interesting, sometimes inexplicably so.

My favourite thing about Pond’s book has been introducing my daughter to the Mitford sisters through it. “Read this book,” I insisted, forcing it on her, and she was annoyed at first, as she is when I insist anything, and she had a hard time reading the cursive. “I don’t get it,” she kept saying at first. “What’s the point of this? They’re not even interesting. I don’t get it—” And then suddenly she stopped, and became incapable of putting the book down, and that’s exactly what I mean. And now she’s dazzled too.

December 5, 2025

Say Hello to My Little Friend, by Jennine Capó Crucet

Two very important details about my 2025 are that I developed a baffling obsession with Pitbull (the Miami artrepreneur also known as Mr. 305 AND Mr. Worldwide), a character who continues to delight me in his absurdity and whose collaborator’s contributions are the best part of his tracks, and also I stopped using Google with its built-in AI in favour of Duck Duck Go, an inferior search engine. But maybe Duck Duck is less inferior than I thought, because when I did a search for Pitbull’s recent coffee table-style book (photographs alongside his many aphorisms like, “Life is not a waste of time, and time is not a waste of life”), it delivered me instead the vastly superior literary product, Say Hello to My Little Friend, by award-winning author Jennine Capó Crucet, a novel billed as Moby Dick meets Scarface whose protagonist is a Pitbull impersonator who’s just been served a cease and desist order by the bald man himself.

Having never read Moby Dick or seen Scarface, and merely being obsessed with Pitbull, however, I wasn’t sure how the novel would go over, but wow, it turned out to be the most bananas wonderful book I’ve encountered in a longtime. The story of Cuban-born Miami resident Ismael “Izzy” Rayes who decides to reinvent himself as Tony Montana from Scarface when his Pitbull career comes to an end, the entire premise a statement from the author about the stereotypes and perceptions about her native city, and how these ideas are limits. (Capó Crucet’s Pitbull critique/commentary was one of the most scathing and hilarious parts of the book).

Meanwhile, Izzy develops a curious connection to Lolita, a captive whale in the Miami Seaquarium, who can read his thoughts and who understands him better than anyone, particularly his situation as someone who is far from his native home, separated from his mother, and stuck in his own kind of captivity as to what the possibilities of his life might be.

And together (cerebrally, at least) the two embark on a journey, one that brings Izzy into the orbit of an intense girlfriend who just happens to be his friend’s sister, a whole bunch of iguanas, a criminal mastermind in disguise as a nice and decent guy, and a whole crew who arrived in America on the same raft that delivered Izzy there from Cuba when he was 7 who do not like the questions he’s asking now in an attempt to remember his own past and what happened to his mother.

If it sounds like this novel is a container for everything, I haven’t even told you yet that it’s also a guide to common birds of Miami, and so much more. I read it absolutely dazzled by Capó Crucet’s talent and awed that she’d partly written it out of spite toward the people who thought that Scarface and Pitbull was where ideas about Miami should begin and end, creating a work that’s a thumb on the nose of all that, but also so rich, poignant, and beautiful…

And oh my god, the ending! The ending! (And I’m not even talking about the epilogue that’s in the voice of Pitbull in a pseudo-intellectual vein [“I’ve gotten to see so much of the world because of my music, and yet the more I saw, the more I realized that despite its catchiness, despite the wildly successful branding that calling myself Mr. 305 created for me and my team, it is at its core a falsity. No one person can “be” a place, for one thing.”]

I loved this book so much. Thank you, Duck Duck Go.