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.

January 2, 2026

Welcome, 2026

I have resisted the urge for old year reflections over the last few days, and not because the old year is one that I would rather forget. On the contrary, I’ve had a really nice year in 2025, but perhaps what was nicest about it was how much I’d learned how to be present in the moment, instead of flinging myself into the unknown future that hasn’t arrived yet or desperately trying to hold onto the past. Or instead of trying to quantify my worth via lists of accomplishments, successes, experiences, etc. I am ever-learning that my own self-worth has nothing to do with any of that, and also that time is a river and life is easiest when I let it flow, instead of trying to hold it all. I’m facing forward instead of looking back, and welcoming whatever comes with curiosity, gratitude, humility, and wonder. Three-cheers for not being an anxiety-fuelled lunatic, could NOT recommend enough.

*Our one concession to old year reflections was once again partaking in my favourite New Year ritual, which is getting 2025 photos printed and working together to order them into an album. It really is the nicest thing.

December 17, 2025

December Enthusiasms

My final “Enthusiasms” newsletter of the year is out! It includes some VERY DRAMATIC NEWS about the whereabouts of my Books of the Year list, and also a link to my recent spot on CBC’s “The Next Chapter” talking about whether literary awards are a scam (spoiler: UH HUH). Read it all here!

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 10, 2025

Gleanings

• each song filling the blue space as I swam my slow kilometer and I kept waiting for one song that I haven’t heard in years and it wasn’t on the list so when I came back home, I found it.
• Joining the silent book club helped me reconnect with the genres that brought me joy before the days of university and seminary. I’ve enjoyed a biography of one of my favourite actors, reread a novel that piqued my attention as an elementary school kid, and now I’m reading the classic Jane Austen novel Pride and Prejudice in anticipation of trying my first murder mystery novel The Murder of Mr. Wickham!
• What if you cherished yourself, I asked my reflection in the bathroom mirror at school, one day last month. It knocked me out.
• I hear this often from these old ladies, a resigned sigh, “but …” they say shortly after sharing their grief, “what can you do?” Perhaps in resignation, perhaps a genuine question, perhaps mostly, the deepest of surrenders, a daily, moment to moment knowing that we can’t escape. No matter how hard we try or how advanced we get or how much we choose to distract ourselves, there’s nothing we can do … it, all of it, all of Life, must be lived.
• Winter always brings a special serenity to woodlands.  For me, tramping along forest trails during winter, snow on the ground muffling my footfall, is a deeply spiritual, personal experience.  I’m slowly learning to embrace that quietude, and engage in some cold weather forest bathing (Shinrin-yoku). I always look for a sheltered area in the sun, but where the breeze is hindered, a cosy spot with a stump to sit on, all the better to relax and observe nature.  
• This is a really entertaining read. There are some dark themes, and some sadness and exhaustion that permeates the pages, but it kept me reading. The look at 90s music, the cost of fame, misogyny in the music world, the world of street art, and the drive toward musical life especially in Jane — it’s all intriguing and slots together really smoothly. With this tough, hard world, I would have loved to see Jane more powerful and less forgiving overall. But it’s a perfect rock n roll story if you’re in the mood for something both nostalgic and edgy. There is a lot to think about, including the ending, and it made for a satisfying read. 
• I’m giving you a free pass on everything I also need a free pass on. For example. When we’re friends IRL but you never comment on or acknowledge anything I do online. I give you a free pass because I know the algo is horseshit. I know you want to be invisible sometimes. I know that you’ve seen my stuff to death. I’m giving you a free pass on staying home when it’s cold out and dark. I’m giving you a free pass on saying awkward things and things you don’t mean to say that just pop out of your mouth. I’m giving you a free pass on the French exit, the Irish exit, the Canadian exit. I’m giving you a free pass on forgetting to bring a hostess gift. I’m giving you a free pass on not wanting to do anything that costs money because who has that lying around? I’m giving you a free pass on getting back to me within a week or two and then burying my email and even accidentally deleting it because that can bloody happen.

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 8, 2025

Books in the Wild

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.

December 3, 2025

Pack of Cards

A recent trip to Bellwoods Books (specializing in vintage books by women) delivered the reward of a Penelope Lively book that I hadn’t read yet. (I didn’t even know that such a book existed!) Just look at that gorgeous edition! In a few weeks, I’ll be falling into holiday mode and only reading books that were published before Taylor Swift was born, this title among them.

Bellwoods Books, with its feminist focus, is the polar opposite of the secondhand bookstore in my forthcoming novel, DEFINITELY THRIVING, a place where books by women aren’t shelved under “literature,” but instead the second tier “women’s fiction.”

On her first visit, before she begins a crusade to change the cataloguing, Clemence manages to overcome her aversion to the place and its practices enough to purchase a small pile of books though. “A respectable haul, it is, and of course, all of the books are priced at just a dollar or two, which might be the upside of supporting a bookstore in which women are devalued. At least it’s a bargain?”

December 2, 2025

Simple Creatures, by Robert McGill

My true confession is that wide-ranging short story collections don’t always do it for me, that I like a book to be A Book, complete with common threads and cohesion, but I really liked Robert McGill’s Simple Creatures—a nominee for this year’s Atwood Gibson Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Partly because his publisher, Coach House Books, knows a thing or two about how to make A Book (the very fibres of their pages are interesting), and also because it was my introduction to his delightfully ever-so-subtly off-the-wall narrative voice which never fails to be surprising, whether he’s writing from the point of view of a wife watching her 76-year-old philandering husband run races from her wheelchair parked on the sidelines, a PhD candidate writing her thesis on an iconic author whose chronicles of small town Ontario have created their own mythology (and then some), an ASMR Youtuber, or a third person story about an endocrinologist reincarnated as a chimpanzee.

Some of these stories go way back—two of them were published in The Journey Prize Stories in 2003. And while others, no doubt, are of similar vintage, each story in the collection reads as fresh, infused with empathy and curiosity for the human condition, and a warmth and humour that sit in balance. Which is not to suggest that these stories are as simple as the creatures that people them. There’s an uneasiness to their cadence, an uncertainty at their core, and McGill’s willingness to let his characters—and his readers—sit with that is why the collection is so rich and engaging.