July 9, 2025
Winter (of Strout) in July
In so many ways, Lucy by the Sea was where it all began for me, the #WinterofStrout. Albeit in 2023, when I finally read it after avoiding Lucy Barton for a long time. I’d read My Name is Lucy Barton when it first came out, and I did not like it. But by the time Elizabeth Strout’s third book about Lucy Barton, Lucy by the Sea, was published, I was willing to give them all another chance, so I reread the first book, read the second (Oh, William!), and finally LBTS, which is where all the pieces began to come together.
During my #WinterofStrout, I’ve been reading all of Strout’s books in chronological order, beginning with her lesser known first two novels, Amy and Isabel, and Abide With Me, which I loved so much. And then Olive Kitteridge, and The Burgess Boys, which I’d read before after the first time I reread Lucy by the Sea, because by then I was in love with Bob Burgess. And it was kind of amazing to meet him again upon rereading Lucy by the Sea, to recall meeting him for the first first time in this book, and how I know him so much better know having read so many other Strout novels in which Bob appears—including Tell Me Everything, which came out last fall, and which Lucy by the Sea is like a bridge to. It was also nice to be rereading Lucy by the Sea as my husband is reading The Burgess Boys, both of us side-by-side in bed reading about Bob. I love the intimacy inherent in that.
The part about rereading Lucy by the Sea that was less delightful was how, when I first read the novel in 2023, and the parts about rising political polarization and tensions in American society reaching a boiling point (the novel is set in in 2020 and 2021, the January 6 insurrection unfolding on its pages) it would have made me think, “Ooof, we dodged a bullet there.” Biden was elected in 2020, and I really supposed the chaos was behind us, that people might actually begin to settle down, that William’s observations about the simmering rage of American people resulting from a very human kind of cruelty and also inequality might have been overblown instead of prescient.
I did appreciate how much less viscerally I experienced the 2020 parts about Covid than when I read it in 2023, that so much of that seems far away from where we are now (which is FINE!).
There is so much that’s wild about this book—that it’s the first time I met Charlene Bibber and Kathryn Caskey too. The torture and sadness of Lucy’s love for her daughters, and all the ways she’s failed them, and all the things that they need from each other that none of them are able to give. The way I’m now fascinated with Margaret, Bob’s wife, the Unitarian minister, who Lucy doesn’t really like, and neither did Bob’s sister-in-law, Helen, and she doesn’t come out great in Tell Me Everything, really. I want to read HER story now. How there’s a part in this novel where Lucy quotes a novel she once read, and while she didn’t cite the novel, I recognized it as a line from Olive, Again (“‘I think our job—maybe even our duty—is to…bear the burden of the mystery with as much grace as we can.”) Imagine the audacity of putting your words from one book in the mouth of a character in another? Imagine how I’d read that line the first time, back when I’d not yet read Olive, Again, and just skimmed right over it like it was no big thing? (And what ELSE did I miss, even this time?)
My #WinterofStrout, stretching all the way to SUMMER, has been such a wonderful, powerful reading experience, lending shape and cohesion to my reading life. I will likely be rereading Tell Me Everything sometime this summer (I read it twice last fall), to see how it reads differently having read all of Strout’s novels now, and no doubt I will find new treasures (and oddities) to discover inside it.
July 7, 2025
This Way Up, by Cathrin Bradbury
Cathrin Bradbury’s memoir This Way Up is an exercise in reorientation, in way-finding. Think about title, the label placed on boxes in transit, a simple instruction to show where the bottom goes. Although the title of the book is also a joke—at age 68, her doctor hands her a drawing labelled “Aging Changes,” and it turns out everything (“muscle mass, blood flow”) is in decline. “The very few times the arrows pointed up were for body fat and bone breaks. The small fibrillations of panic I had studying the diagram, the merest skips in my heart, were right there under myocardial irritability: ‘UP^'”
“I was going to need a map,” the book begins, with Bradbury on the cusp of her fourth quarter, and changes in the mix. Her marriage has ended, she’s retired from a career in journalism, her children are grown, and yet none of this indicates the end of her story. And it seems there exists no instruction manual for finding one’s way forward at this pivotal time of life, a moment at which she’s finding new love, discovering a new vocation as a writer, and reconsidering the stories she told herself about her history. And so, unable to procure a map for the future, she finds one that takes her into the past instead, a map of the setting from her earliest memories, St. Catharines, Ontario, consulting her trusty siblings to make sense of where she came from, who she’s been.
This Way Up is a delightful, hilarious, and richly crafted story of getting one’s bearings when everything seems upside down. It’s a terrifically candid story of mothering adult children (Bradbury’s daughter’s constant refrain of “Oh my god, Mom…” made her one of my favourite characters in the book), of sustaining longtime friendship, the twists and turns (and pokes) of sibling relationships, and the physical and emotional realities of aging. It’s also beautifully bookish, full of literary allusions, and a wonderful nonfiction companion to Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy By the Sea.
I loved this book, speeding through it in just two sittings. The structure and form are fascinating. On the surface, the reading is direct and straightforward, easy and breezy, but there are such depths, threads beautifully woven into the narrative, appearing and reappearing, so precise and impactful—nothing easy about it at all, except the way it’s such a gorgeous pleasure to read.
July 3, 2025
June
June was a whirlwind, a blur, an ice cream cone from a truck with rainbow sprinkles, a veritable bouquet of peony pouffs at various stages of open. It technically began in late May with my gorgeous eldest child’s sixteenth birthday, a coming of age of sorts, a celebration of the wonders of her, which only get more wondrous. Leading right into her younger sister’s karaoke birthday party, the best kid birthday party I’ve even thrown, by which I mean that I had the best time and was not even exhausted when it was over. Her actual birthday (twelve!) was five days later, and we had just as much fun celebrating her goodness, and still weren’t remotely tired of ice cream cake (good thing too). I’d had an elaborate bouquet of peonies delivered the weekend before, the greatest indulgence, and watching how the flowers changed marked the passing of the days. And there were the final book launches of a very busy literary season, welcoming wonderful works into the world. On a day in which some people assembled to watch a sad military parade in another country, I gathered under shady trees with my singing group and our families, a beautiful afternoon of singing (and pot luck) in High Park, singing songs of peace and love and freedom. We spent Father’s Day riding bikes on Toronto Island and partaking in our first swim of the year in lovely Lake Ontario—a perfect day. A few days after that, my husband and I celebrated twenty years of marriage, an incredible milestone, time gone by in a flash (save for the millions of different people we’ve been and lost through the years). As nauseating as it sounds, I love him more every single day (7300 and counting) and we go out of our ways to be kind to each other, to make life a little easier for each other, and I feel unfathomably lucky. The day after that, our youngest graduated from elementary school, and helping to organize the event was my final volunteer commitment at that school (which I only committed to because my husband joined me too), which meant we had to chaperone, which was bonkers, but also the event went so well and we were so proud of her. And by this point, my sister and her children had arrived for a visit, so we went straight from grad to their hotel downtown and swam in the rooftop pool in a furious wind. The next night, we all went to a baseball game together, the first time my kids had been, and it was Pride Night, and so much fun—my husband and kids had their makeup done, and the jumbo-tron was all same-sex couples kissing, and it was truly joyous and beautiful and I am glad we went, even if the Blue Jays were terrible. (I also realized that if, as I do, you frequent farmers’ markets, the prices on snacks at the Sky Dome seem really quite reasonable.) On Saturday, we rode our bikes to the see the Joyce Wieland Heart On exhibit at the AGO. By Monday, the heat wave was ON, but the city pools were open, so we had our first swim of the year at Christie Pits. The next day was my birthday, on which I lavished myself with all the pleasures—I spent the morning doing hot and cold plunges at Body Blitz while reading a waterproof book (!), and then I took myself out for a delicious lunch (while reading the new Laura Lippman), and then went to swim in my ordinary pool, and then that night we went back to Christie Pits, which meant I had THREE (3!) bathing suits hanging to dry by the end of the day, plus more ice cream cake. By the next day, the heat had broken, and I spent the afternoon on a patio with friends. The next day was a get-together with school families to celebrate our daughters’ graduation and the years they’ve been friends at school together. The next day was the last last day of school ever, which was really moving and a little bit hard, and then the day after that, we ran away to camp for three days in the wilderness, and the weather was perfect. And the day after that, June was over.
Something I succeeded at in June, and vow to take into my summer, is experiencing the goodness in the moment, being present. In years past, it has felt like posting/sharing my moments was as important as living them, which is an icky way to feel, not even just because I require other people to witness my milestones for them to seem valid and real, but also because it seemed like trying to hold onto something that was ephemeral, and maybe just letting the moments (days) go by is fine, because they’re going to anyway. I don’t have to hold them. And the other remarkable thing I was feeling was a real sense of calm and relaxation. I realize that so many of the times I’ve savoured over the last five years have felt like a reprieve from crisis (because so often they were), which is not the same as feeling GOOD (although it’s certainly BETTER!). And the crises in which we were operating left me with a real sense of scarcity—like that lake HAD to be swam in, because after that, who knew when I would swim again, which was definitely the case in 2020, and sometimes 2021, and I never quite lost that sense… But maybe I have? For now, at least.
There’s a less manic quality to my experience of summer. I do not need to be photographed leaping into pools. I can just leap into pools. And I do.
July 2, 2025
A Dark Death, by Alice Fitzpatrick
I was lucky to be born in Canada, and doubly lucky to also be able to also choose Canada when I moved (back) here with my immigrant spouse exactly 20 years and two days ago. My feelings about Canada Day and nationalism are always complicated (which I think they should be), and they’re additionally complicated this year with Canada’s sovereignty under threat. The world is so weird and interesting, and nations are made-up stories, but also so is everything.
This past long weekend (which stretched four days long) kicked off summer for us with a beautiful weekend camping in one of our favourite places on the shores of Lake Erie. And I was thrilled to delighting in a Canadian novel on the beach, Alice Fitzpatrick’s A DARK DEATH, the second book in her Meredith Island Mystery series (I haven’t read the first, jumped right into this one, and it was fine!). Meredith Island is a small and homey Welsh island where retired teacher Kate Galway (who solved her aunt’s murder the summer before) is hoping to finish her novel, but there is too much happening for that even before the first body turns up. A group of archaeology students is unearthing supposed evidence of a Roman temple, and a conman posing as a psychic is stirring up trouble among her neighbours, and then all hope of tranquility is lost when a body turns up amidst the dig site. Once again, the local constabulary is going to require Kate’s assistance, although they’re calling it meddling. And what about the minister who has locked herself inside the church and seems to have lost her faith? Or the shopkeeper who has fallen under suspicion for the murder, even though Kate knows that surely he hasn’t done it.
The narrative moves between multiple perspectives, Kate sharing the story with her neighbours, with the young police detective who is one of Kate’s former students, her artist friend who is looking to seduce the detective, the Professor leading the dig, his errant students, with the Minister, and her doctor husband. The result is a satisfying (and amusing) picture of a community with Three Pines vibes, each character with his or her own struggles and temptations, and a fun and absorbing mystery to follow, and this series might be joining my own personal list of must-reads.
It’s also one of 49thShelf’s July Summer Reading picks, if you feel like doing some Canadian reading yourself. And even better—each and every title on the list is up for giveaway!
June 26, 2025
In Crisis, On Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times, by James Cairns
I have trouble with understanding things, with understanding proportion. As someone with anxiety, I tend towards catastrophic thinking anyway, and so I get confused with how the media reports such things, how it all gets compounded. An example, say, like Covid, which came along with the most infectious variant ever, and then the one after that which was even more infectious, and then one that 20 times more infectious, and that was around the time my brain broke into bits, because how is that even possible?
What does it mean when everything everywhere is a crisis? James Cairns’ essay collection In Crisis, On Crisis is an effort to answer that question, and belongs to a genre of literature from which I’ve been finding answers this spring, and includes Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Theories of Water and The Snag, by Tessa McWatt. There was a time, a little under a decade ago, when people who marching around holding signs that said, “I WANT YOU TO PANIC,” and let me tell you, I did what they said, but all I got was a mental breakdown. And so what I’m looking for these days are stories for how we can still live rich and meaningful lives in this moment, while envisioning possibilities for a different kind of future.
These essays by Cairns—a professor at Wilfrid Laurier University and also a socialist—are a fascinating blending of personal, cultural, and scholarly, many of his broader ideas about living amidst crisis underlined by his experience as someone who lives with addiction, someone who has relapsed and recovered in the past, and could very well do so again: “The fact is, I’m not going to drink today. And if I relapse tomorrow or ten months from now, I have experience and supports to get me through it. It won’t necessarily mean my life is ruined. But it might. There is no curing, no transcending my alcoholism./ This is a crisis. This is not a crisis.”
How do we live knowing that bad things can happen? How do we live knowing that bad things will happen? In these essays—which delve into Trumpism, apocalyptic reading, whether we are in fact living through a crisis of democracy, midlife crises and Karl Ove Knausgaard, fatalism and Sylvia Plath, the experience of moving during a pandemic, if now is a “post-truth” moment, fears and anxieties about his children and their futures in the face of the climate crisis—Cairns delves deep into these questions and urges the reader to leave room for possibility.
June 26, 2025
Abundance
My anxiety was really bad this winter, February and March spent in a state of generalized terror, for reasons that were all in my head, and also not entirely. It was awful. And near the end of March, I wrote about the seeds I’d planted, using the examples of the hard winters I’ve been through before to suggest that these don’t last forever. That we can plant seeds that bloom, even when the planting seems futile, the blooming impossible. To plant seeds at all is to believe in the future, even if that believing is difficult. It’s a kind of faith, and I was wrestling with all that as I wrote about the seeds that had planted, the seeds that had sprouted.
And then for maybe a week or so, nothing happened at all, and I wondered if I’d jinxed myself by writing that post. (I’ve learned that I really can’t write about my anxiety. To write about my anxiety is to try to harness it, control it, and whenever I do, even with the best intentions, I get even more anxious. I’m learning that I just have to let my anxiety be…) But eventually, more seeds sprouted, and then more and more, those snapdragon specks I’d stuck in the soil growing into seedlings (and also chamomile, and also nasturtiums, one with its first flower that I picked and ate this morning, the circle of life).
I love snapdragons so very much. They’re so eye-catching, colourful, and they grow and grow—I was still making bouquets out of them last November! And this year, for the first time ever, there were snapdragon seedlings for sale at our local convenience store/garden centre, so I bought a bunch of these, partly because I’m greedy, but also because I still wasn’t sure that my seedlings would grow—or that they were even snapdragons at all because I’m a very disorganized gardener who plants my seeds and then loses track of everything.
But as the seedlings grew (and were transplanted outside into pots), I finally learned what they looked like, which meant that when even more started popping up everywhere, I recognized them immediately. Turns out that, in addition to the snapdragons I’d planted in March and bought at the store in May, the plants from last year had self-seeded all over the place, so that so many of the pots in my garden have snapdragons growing up around the edges, and as the flowers begin to arrive, I am just so in love with this entire arrangement (and also with how much better I feel than I felt a few months ago).
I am glad I had faith and planted seeds with abandon, but it’s also amazing to consider that, had I done nothing at all, the flowers still would have bloomed.
June 25, 2025
Gleanings
- One of my photography passions is wildflowers; they fascinate and charm me. All of them — even the simplest, most humble dandelions. Especially the dandelions.
- There are less and less … both dances, and people of that time. I look around the room, and can’t help but think it is inevitable, before this too, is gone. The man now alone with his guitar and laptop was once a part of a band, widows dancing with widows, some barely shuffling their feet and yet, here we are, the young so delighted by the old, the old enlivened by the young.
- And honestly, that’s my favourite thing about travel: the way that even the most foreign of experiences can remind you of something familiar.
- Writers, thinkers, listeners, see-ers, who insert themselves into the subject at hand. For me that brings an immediacy, an authenticity.
- I trust my imaginative plane as much as some people trust their god, or their tarot, or their psychic. I do. So, as I float about… what does it mean that i can’t stay still, that my foundation is afloat? Is it bad? Is it the world? Has the utter crazy of the global and national scene just knocked my roots from under me? The hope that is a usual tether has been snipped and I’m off.
- It turns out that being a real friend means doing something incredibly hard and, in a way, unkind: confronting Nicola with the truth. “Wake up,” Helen finally says; “You’ve got to get ready.”
- When Judith’s peonies, poppies and Irises are all in full bloom (and her red door is flung wide open to let the breeze in on her jewel of a home) it is a sight to drop-your-Metro-bags and behold. I learn so much about gardening –– about human nature –– by observing people in their gardens.
- We need beauty to help us weather out the storm.
- ‘Welp, I read the internet,’ he’d sometimes tell me around 10 am. “Got anything else for me?”
- But watching the bear, who was no doubt the offspring of one of the original bears — a child, a grandchild? — I realized that the orchard is remembered, in the way the beautiful old crabapple tree is remembered by successive generations of those same bears. It’s not what I expected but it’s something sweet.
- Baiting with Tolkien, luring Whippets named Rapunzel, and other ways to make friends.
- It occurs to me that we writers should emulate lighthouses and shine our lights without prejudice or favour, just keep putting our beams out there. If it guides some away from the treacherous shoals of life, all the better. If it helps other readers keep their own boats on course, comforted to know another kindred spirit is out there, has been through these same storms and survived, that’s all good too.
- It felt like life was curating the perfect evening.
- I have a terminal case of wanderlust. But even as the scrolling and research heightens my anticipation, once I arrive, alone, in a foreign city, I’m often struck by the question: Why? Why did I haul myself in a cramped seat across the ocean and plunk myself down, alone, in a strange place. What am I doing here?
- I also think it’s essential for an editor to be connected to the world at large, because the publishing industry is a mirror for society.
- The funny thing about bookshops is that their most regular patrons are the ones who aren’t short of things to read at all!The double-stackers, the hoarders, the ambitious lunatics, I love them dearly.
June 23, 2025
School’s Out Forever
“But because I am neither my protagonist nor a bad-ass, I ended up joining Parent Council just so nobody would think I was Mitzi Bytes (in spite of all the ways I obviously was), and due to many qualities that would eventually land me in therapy, I dove into school volunteerism like a maniac…” All readers can read my essay “School’s Out Forever,” a reflection on the last 12 years I’ve spent as part of my kids’ school community as we’re now in our final week there.
And my June essay for paid subscribers is out now, which begins, “Of all the authorial humblings I’ve experienced, having the autobiographical protagonist of my debut novel deemed generally unlikeable has been one of the more complicated to process.” Don’t miss “The Perils of Writing to Find Friends.”
June 20, 2025
Water Borne, by Dan Rubinstein
I became an admirer of Dan Rubinstein with his 2015 book BORN TO WALK: THE TRANSFORMATIVE POWER OF A PEDESTRIAN ACT, which I read not long after Rebeccca Solnit’s WANDERLUST, loving how the two books were complementary, and with his latest release, WATER BORNE, I am once again struck by how beautifully his work fits into a wider literary context, specifically books about water and rivers that have also come out this spring by Robert Macfarlane and Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, both of whom would likely also have underlined the following lines from Rubinstein’s book, “…borders, like the fringes of any lake, river, or ocean, are transition zones. The rough margins where change comes slowly, from the friction of daily and seasonal cycles. Or in a tremendous burst, like water breaching a dam.”
WATER BORNE is the story of Rubinstein’s journey by stand-up paddleboard (SUP) from his home in Ottawa, Ontario, to Montreal on the Ottawa River; from Montreal to New York City via the Lake Champlain and the Hudson River; and Albany, NY, to Buffalo, via the Erie Canal; and then from St. Catharines to Kingston, via Lake Ontario; and back home to Ottawa on the Rideau Canal. It’s also the story of the strangers he met along the way, the friends and relations who supported him, odd conversations at campgrounds, a chronicle of lost sunglasses., and the history of these waterways, man-made, histories that tell of the rise and fall of different industries over centuries, a progress that led to the degradation of lakes and rivers and the health of creatures who make their lives by their waters.
But it’s also the story of people who are working to change this cycle, of projects to restore life to waterways, both in terms of the natural world and actually making these waterways accessible to the people who’d most benefit from this access, people who don’t have the luxury of vacation houses or even swimming lessons. Throughout the book, Rubinstein imparts the wonders of “blue spaces,” which are like green spaces, but even better for our mental health. Considering all of this as he paddles during a season where the temperature is breaking heat records and the air is thick with smoke from wildfires. What lessons can blue spaces teach us at a moment when the stakes are oh so high.
Rubinstein’s narrative is funny and engaging, and personal as he weaves his family’s story in among the broader history. (His mother, who tracks his locations, and sends worried texts, is one of the best characters in the book.) Nimbly, he blends memoir with reportage to make a story that flows beautifully, and is both hopeful and inspiring, and a must-read for those of us who love blue spaces already.
June 17, 2025
Mystery Books I’ve Loved This Spring
Widows and Orphans, by Kate Hilton and Elizabeth Renzetti
There is no joy quite like the second instalment of a mystery series being EVEN BETTER THAN THE FIRST, especially when the writers are your friends and you get to tell them so. I loved Bury The Lead, the first book in the Quill & Packet series about journalist Cat Conway’s relocation to a small cottage community where she works at the local paper, and the next book finds her covering a wellness conference where the supplements include murder. I was expecting a fun mystery, and was delighted to find this underlined by a biting critique of conspiracy quackery which reads as all too timely.
(Listen to the authors talking about their first book on the first season of the BOOKSPO podcast!)
Detective Aunty, by Uzma Jalalludin
Imagine a Miss Marple-type detective, a sharp eyed older woman whose invisibility permits her all kinds of access, except she’s a Muslim-Canadian on a cusp of a brand new life after her husband’s death who is called on to help prove her daughter’s innocence when she’s accused of killing her shady landlord in Scarborough, Ontario. Can Kausar Kaur crack the case? Jalalludin is best known for her romance novels, but as she told me in our recent conversation on BOOKSPO, she was a mystery reader first and this is the detective novel she’s been hoping to write since the beginning of career as a novelist.
A Most Puzzling Murder, by Bianca Marais
The never-boring Marais returns with her fourth novel, a book unlike anything you’ve ever read before, except maybe the “Choose Your Own Adventure” novels that absorbed your attention during childhood, because A Most Puzzling Murder is just as engaging, the story of Destiny, a brilliant young woman who is alone in the world and hoping to find family when she encounters the Scruffmore family on their strange and isolated island. But it turns out that the stakes are higher than she thought, and it’s up Destiny to solve a series of puzzles (which are the reader solves alongside her) to solve a murder and figure out the mystery of her past.
Who By Water, by Greg Rhyno
Another second-book-in-the-series that didn’t let me down, Greg Rhyno’s Who By Water marks the return of Dame Polara, reluctant PI, except she’s a single mother now, which means the stakes are oh-so-high when her ex-husband is killed and Dame has apparently been framed for his murder. The novel’s vivid Toronto setting and the complicated character of its protagonist are just two of the reasons to pick this up (listen to Rhyno on BOOKSPO talking about how he went about writing a female character whose depiction wouldn’t make woman readers throw the book at the wall), and the great mystery at its heart will keep you gripped.
The Cost of a Hostage, by Iona Whishaw
And oh, I look forward to Iona Whisaw’s Lane Winslow mysteries so very much, with their setting and people that feel like home to me. I already wrote about The Cost of a Hostage here! Once again, Whishaw brings her readers a story with fascinating moral complexity and a healthy dose of feminism and progressive values. And yes, just enough peril that you’ll be totally gripped.
The Last Exile, by Sam Wiebe
And from my “On Our Radar” column at 49thShelf: My toxic trait is jumping right into mystery series midway through, a habit that horrifies some people, but I promise you that good writers design their books so it’s possible, and if I had to start at the beginning every time, I might never ever bother. But I’m so glad I did with Sam Wiebe’s Dave Wakeland series, and its latest installment, The Last Exiles, in which PI Wakeland returns to Vancouver to help prove the innocence of a rough-around-the-edges single mother accused of murdering a retired biker and his wife in their luxurious float home. It’s deftly plotted, absolutely gripping, and has real heart. (And yes, I will read the other books now!)
