February 2021 Reading Round-Up

I've read so many great books this month that I'm going to split my highlights into several parts. Watch for an upcoming spotlight on Black authors, and a special St. Patrick's Day post featuring Irish authors. 

Today's mix includes: three stories that centre on an adult with a disability; three by or about Indigenous women; three in comics format; three audiobooks; three in translation; and four by Canadians.

We Are Not Free by Traci Chee

I started reading this book on February 19, 2021. On that same date in 1942, President Roosevelt signed the order that allowed the forced removal of over 100,000 Japanese Americans to concentration camps. (Japanese Canadians were similarly interned as "enemy aliens.") 

We Are Not Free is a poignant, lively, eye-opening novel in the voices of 14 teens from San Francisco, who are living in prison camps during World War II. It's an outstanding and heartbreaking portrayal of injustice and resilience. The rise, during 2020, in hate crimes against Asian Americans and Asian Canadians is a sad indication that the message of this novel remains relevant. It's YA for everybody.

“Wait,” I say. “You met Eleanor Roosevelt?”
“Yeah. She was saying we had to be in camps because we hadn‘t been integrated into the rest of American society like the Germans and the Italians, and I told her we hadn‘t integrated because we weren‘t allowed to buy or move anywhere except into neighborhoods that were already Japanese, so whose fault was it that we couldn‘t integrate?”

"In PM Magazine, Dr Seuss, the kids‘ book author, has been drawing us
with pig noses and wiry moustaches, queuing up for boxes of TNT.
There are all sorts of cartoons like that. Sometimes we look like pigs,
sometimes monkeys, sometimes rats. We never look like us."

It Began with a Page: How Gyo Fujikawa Drew the Way 

by Kyo Maclear and Julie Morstad

A stunning picture book biography of Japanese American artist Gyo Fujikawa (1908-1998), who was an iconoclast with a passion for social justice. Fujikawa‘s first author-illustrated book, Babies, portrayed children of all skin colours. It took several years for her to convince her publisher to take it on, but she was adamant. It was published in 1963 and sold nearly 2,000,000 copies. 

Canadians Kyo Maclear and Julie Morstad read Fujikawa‘s books when they were children and both say she inspired their own work in creating children‘s books that portray diversity.  

The Centaur's Wife by Amanda Leduc

Amanda Leduc is a Canadian writer and disability activist. In her second novel, a woman with cerebral palsy falls in love with a centaur. There‘s magic in the soil of a planet fed up with human greed; a heroic lesbian couple helping the survivors of an apocalyptic meteor shower; a young woman who had been waiting for a lung transplant; and a fox who wants to be a mother. It‘s a surprising, carefully crafted, poignant and fabulist story of love and grief, seeded with brief original fairy tales. 

“Stories are never just stories,” her father had said. “There‘s always a kernel of truth hidden deep within the words.”

She drew herself, a wide-eyed 12-year-old, one leg shorter than the other, her feet twisted and bent. Her mouth open in a silent scream.
She drew herself now. Her father‘s eyes, her father‘s smile. The uneven legs and lopsided shoulders that were entirely her own.

The mountain told him that humans lived the way that comets shot across the night sky—bright and burning, falling, gone. If you blinked, they disappeared.

Alone by Chabouté
Translated by Ivanka Hahnenberger

A graphic novel masterpiece about isolation, imagination, and letting go of fear. A disfigured hermit lives alone in a lighthouse with a dictionary and a goldfish as company. More alone than any covid lockdown. The cinematic style of French cartoonist Chabouté evokes the sounds of waves and gulls as well as the sense of remoteness. There are few words: this story is all about emotions. 

Buffy Sainte-Marie: The Authorized Biography by Andrea Warner
Audiobook read by the author and Buffy Sainte-Marie

Buffy's life story is amazing. Born on the Piapot reserve in Saskatchewan, she was adopted by an American family. Buffy faced many obstacles but she was determined to create and perform. Much of this biography is about her music, giving us a peek into the alchemy that underpins her artistry. Her lyrics come from her heart and they address social injustices with such power that her music was blacklisted by the US government (Lyndon Johnson and Nixon eras). The audiobook is narrated with obvious admiration and respect by Andrea Warner, with short interludes read by Buffy herself. Introduction by Joni Mitchell.

I have two main prayers: one is “thanks!” and the other is “wow!”

At one point in this biography I began a sentence with the words “Tearing down,” and in the editing process Buffy crossed them out and provided this alternative: “Creating, in spite of and beyond.” That simple reframing blew my mind. I actually felt a seismic shift in my brain. My own language has a tendency to be rooted in destruction. […] while her language is rooted in possibility, a desire to grow, explore and persuade.
-from the Afterword

The Yield by Tara June Winch

Indigenous peoples in Australia have had similar traumatic experiences with colonialism as in Canada, including stolen generations, racist violence and suppression of cultures. Using three perspectives—bisexual August‘s contemporary storyline; her grandfather‘s dictionary of Wiradjuri language and ancestral memory; and the account of a 19th-century Lutheran missionary—healing and cultural reclamation subtly unfolds in the “space between things.”

Marks or tracks, impressions of passing objects—MURRU
This is the tracks the snakes, the goanna, the birds, and us make as we crisscross the world. We all leave murru behind, so leave a gentle one.

What's a tin mine look like?
Big hole.
Is it bad?
‘Member Wizard of Oz?
Yeah.
‘Member Tin Man?
Yeah.
Well there's a reason he doesn't have a heart, darl.
What's that mean?
That tin don't love anyone or anything back.

The Night Watchman by Louise Erdrich

When I finished this layered historical novel set in the 1950s, I felt suffused by a warm emotional afterglow. Multiple characters and interlocking storylines give a sense of community and the many intractable problems faced by people of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa reserve. The most pressing issue is that they face termination in the eyes of the US government. My heart opened and welcomed in a whole bunch of wonderful characters.

Every so often the government remembered about Indians. And when they did, they always tried to ‘solve‘ Indians, thought Thomas. They solve us by getting rid of us.

The cold sap was a spring tonic. When you drank it, you shared the genius of the woods.

Sometimes now, a word failed to come to him when he was speaking, and in those times he substituted a descriptive phrase for the word, comically, and got a laugh. Just the other day he'd forgotten the word for car trunk, and said, “automobile cave with a hinge,” which was taken for wit.

Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg 

by Kate Evans

“I want to affect people like a clap of thunder.” In this highly researched and visually appealing graphic biography, we get to know the remarkable Rosa Luxemburg. A Polish Jew with a crippled leg, she was a dynamo who received her PhD in 1897 in Zurich. She devoted her brilliant mind to social activism on behalf of workers. Her revolutionary theory addressed unemployment, lethal working conditions, starvation wages, evictions and more.

The distinctive feature of capitalism is the precariousness of the worker.

Clara: I know all mothers fret, but I do wish Kostya would do something with his life.
Rosa: Give him time. I‘m sure he‘ll find his feet. He‘s doing better than our glorious Party leaders. Far better to be a dreamer than to aim to shoot down the dreams of others.

Don‘t forget, as busy as you may be, to quickly raise your head
and cast a glance at those great silver clouds and
that silent blue ocean in which they are swimming.

The Adventures of China Iron by Gabriela Cabezon Camara
Translated by Fiona Mackintosh and Iona Macintyre

China Iron, mother of two by the time she's 14, embarks on a joyous Pippi Longstocking-ish picaresque journey through 19th-century Argentina, discovering the nature of Spanish colonialism, British imperialism, and her own pansexual self along the way. At journey's end is a way of harmonious connection with her beloved land: the ways and knowledge of the Indigenous peoples.

I took off my dress and the petticoats and put on the Englishman‘s breeches and shirt. I put on his neckerchief and asked Liz to take the scissors and cut my hair short. My plait fell to the ground and there I was, a young lad. Good boy, she said to me, then pulled my face towards her and kissed me on the mouth.

She was my North and I was the quivering needle on a compass: my whole body was pulled towards her, dwarfed by the strength of my desires. It was under the sway of that force that I began to feel, and now I think perhaps it‘s always that way, that you feel the world through others, through your bond with others.

It doesn‘t seem right, there are hardly any birds in the pampas and the few we have are low-flying or can‘t fly at all. You get flamingos like clouds of shrill pink on the horizon. You get ñandús that run faster than horses, their strong elastic legs scything the ground and raising the dust. The ñandús connect pampa and sky.

I, having lived wholly inside the dust, having been little more than one of the many forms that dust took there, having been contained in that atmosphere—the earth of the pampa is also the sky—started to feel it, to notice it, to hate it when it made my teeth gritty, when it stuck to my sweat, when it weighed down my hat. We declared war on the dust, all the while knowing that we were fighting a losing battle: we come from dust.

The smell of near-black tea leaves torn from the green mountains of India that would travel to Britain without losing their moisture, and without losing the sharp perfume born of the tears Buddha shed for the world‘s suffering, suffering that also travels in tea: we drink green mountains and rain, and we also drink what the Queen drinks. We drink the Queen, we drink work, we drink the broken back of the man bent double as he cuts the leaves […]

The Godmother by Hannelore Cayre

Translated by Stephanie Smee

A struggling single mother in her 50s is caught between the university expenses for her daughters and the care home costs for her mother in this darkly tongue-in-cheek tale of criminals in contemporary France.

She had asked to be cremated with her ashes scattered in a department store. The girls and I carried out her final wishes, selecting the Galeries Lafayette. I chose to scatter my share through the boutiques of her favourite designers. If you happened to find a bit of grey dust or some strange little bits of matter at the bottom of your Dior, Nina Ricci or Balenciaga suit pockets from the Spring-Summer 2017 collection—that was my mother.

And while I had plenty of faults, he had one big one: he believed in God. Philippe, this man who was integrity personified, intelligent, cultured and witty… believed in God! It just seems so unlikely that anybody could give any credibility to such a load of rubbish. He could have confided in me a belief that our fate as humans was predetermined by a dish of celestial noodles and I wouldn‘t have found it less ridiculous.

My father, good colonial that he was, had taught me at the same age he himself had learned, that‘s to say, at the age of 10. I still remembered the recoil ripping into my shoulder as he made me shoot, over and over, until I could absorb the shock with my body. So when my parents went out to a restaurant, they could leave me alone between the motorway and the forest with the revolver on the bedside table and not waste a moment worrying about whether I might be scared—after all, what babysitter could be as good as a .357 Magnum?

Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi

Audiobook read by Vineeta Rishi

A prickly, unsettling story about love and hatred between a mother and daughter in contemporary India. The making of art, the unmaking of mental illness. Buried secrets. Riveting.

I told her that staying doesn‘t have the appeal, the mystery, of escape. To stay is to be staid, to be resigned, to believe this is all there will ever be. Aren‘t we creatures made for searching, investigation, dominion? Aren‘t we built to believe there can always be something better?

Everything Sad Is Untrue (A True Story) by Daniel Nayeri

Audiobook read by the author

A warm, touching and very funny autobiographical novel about the author‘s experiences as an Iranian refugee in middle school in Oklahoma. He tells this as a class project in the style of 1001 Nights, incorporating ancient lore with family history and stories about poop. The audiobook would be a great choice for family listening.

All Persians are liars and lying is a sin.
That's what the kids in Mrs. Miller's class think, but I'm the only Persian they've ever met, so I don't know where they got that idea.
My mom says it's true, but only because everyone has sinned and needs God to save them. My dad says it isn't. Persians aren't liars. They're poets, which is worse.

Here is a list of the foods from Iran that they have never heard of here: all of it. All the food. Jared Rhodes didn‘t even know what a date was.

The shame of refugees is that we always have to explain ourselves. It makes our stories patchworks, not beautiful rugs.

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, adapted into graphic novel format by Ryan North and Albert Monteys

A powerful graphic novel adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut‘s anti-war classic. Billy Pilgrim‘s mind came unstuck during his time as a soldier in WWII. He was a POW in Dresden when Allied forces killed over 25,000 civilians in one night, flattening the city. Being abducted by aliens who explain the nature of time… slipping forwards and backwards to important scenes from Pilgrim‘s life: it works so well in images!

When I saw those freshly-shaved faces, it was a shock. “My God, my God,”
I said to myself — it's the Children‘s Crusade.”

January 2021 Reading Round-Up

January highlights include:

• Two Canada Reads titles that I serendipitously read before the list was announced.
• Two astounding novels that transported me out of winter and into a summer climate.
• Four wonderful memoirs.
• Two for youth that I picked up on account of them winning American Library Association awards this month.
• Two contemporary novels (Weather and Memorial) that I meant to get to last year and were well worth the wait.
• Three absorbing works of speculative fiction.
• Two haunting books in translation, both about Jewish experiences during WWII.
• Two gorgeous graphic novels.
• One fantastic reread.
• One eyeopening popular science audiobook.
• And two in French, but not reviewed below. They are Grand frere by Mahir Guven and Nos richesses by Kaouther Adimi.

Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots

Anna Tromedlov (read that backwards for fun) is a bisexual hench (a gender neutral version of henchman) doing office work through a temp agency. After being injured in the crossfire between a superhero and a villain, she uses her data analysis skills to show that heroes are actually a net detriment to society. It‘s dangerous to expose truth, no matter what world women live in. Fast-moving, feminist and highly original. I'm curious to see how this will do in the Canada Reads competition.

“Okay everyone,” the woman with the call sheet said, clapping her hands for a moment of attention. “Remember your job is to make your boss more impressive. Loom, but don‘t mean-mug too hard. Try to project some intensity, but take your cues from E and don‘t go overboard. You‘re like … evil bridesmaids. You‘re here to make him look even better.”

“Pretty tough, then, for a nerd chick.” Blowtorch let his eyelids become heavy and he smirked at me. “That‘s hot.” He shot some sparks out of the tip of one finger for emphasis. It was extraordinarily embarrassing for everyone in the room.

Two Trees Make a Forest: Travels Among Taiwan's Mountains and Coasts in Search of My Family's Past by Jessica J Lee
Audiobook [6 hr] read by the author

In an articulate, wide-ranging mix of botany, geography, history, travel and memoir, Canadian author Jessica J Lee writes about Taiwan and her search for answers about her family. The title comes from her description of massive trees that have been saved from logging: two are big enough to make a forest. I‘m glad to have listened to the audiobook narrated by the author, who explains key Chinese words related to nature. This is another of the Canada Reads contenders this year and I'm hoping it will win.

The island is now building a DNA database of its trees, effectively creating a genetic footprint for samples of illegal wood, a forensic track to the forest in which a tree was felled, in hopes of increasing successful prosecutions. The situation for both poachers and police remains brutally dangerous.

The cedars [Taiwania cryptomerioides] in this forest were once abundant. Fossils of them have been found as far away as Alaska dating from more than 100,000,000 years ago and in Europe some 60,000,000 years ago. Once spread throughout the northern hemisphere, these lonely trees now stand endangered in the few places they remain. 

… opening to a brush of fine filaments. They looked like those fibre optic lamps made from fishing line, with great feathered clusters of pink strands, yellow at their tips, and so lightly fused to the base of the flowers that the slightest disturbance showered the ground in a floral rain. [Barringtonia asiatica]

Summer by Ali Smith

I slowed my reading pace to savour the gorgeous prose and because I didn‘t want this novel to end. Then, when I finished, I immediately wanted to start again from the beginning. Instead, I think I will go back to the first in the quartet, Autumn, then reread them all in order. Summer is the final book in the quartet. They are cunningly interlinked, yet each stands on its own. Beautiful, breathtaking, big-picture novels, attuned to the reality that each life is valuable.

Change just comes, the man says. It comes of necessity. You have to go with it and make something of what it makes of you.

T‘was ever so, her mother says. Since summer first was leafy.
Now her mother‘s saying lines from when she was an actress. But the only thing her mother was apparently ever really in was a washing up liquid advert on TV back before everything. Sacha was shown the advert when she was little, there‘s a video of it in a cupboard, now unwatchable because there are no video players left alive.

Of course I‘m quoting Einstein, Hannah says. Well, paraphrasing. He said that the only real religion humans have is the matter of freeing ourselves from the delusion that we‘re separate from each other and second that we‘re separate from the universe, and the only peace of mind we‘ll ever get, he says, is when we try to overcome this delusion.

Face like an Eastertime lamb, head like a dandelion clock, but a dandelion clock holding the hidden infrastructure not just of the world. Universe too.

Dishevelled genius; because genius doesn‘t need to be hevelled, whatever hevelled is.

The Weekend by Charlotte Wood
Audiobook [7 hr] read by Pauline Constantine

Three longtime friends, all in their 70s, are each such distinct and believable characters that I found it easy to follow the shifting viewpoints in this poignant Australian novel. Tempers flare and long-held secrets surface as they grieve the death of a fourth friend who was the glue in their friendship. Two of the women are bisexual: an added bonus. An elderly dog* is an important and fully realized character in his own right. If you love character-based novels, this is exquisite.
*note: The dog does NOT die.

The 30s were the age you fell most dangerously in love, Adele had discovered, after the fact. Not with a man or a woman, but with your friends.

Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May
Audiobook [7 hr] read by Rebecca Lee

A soothing literary balm that helped me see winter and depression from an entirely new viewpoint. I borrowed the audiobook from the library after hearing a friend read from it during a zoom literary salon. I've since bought a print copy so that I can reread it whenever I like.

Once we stop wishing it were summer, winter can be a glorious season in which the world takes on a sparse beauty and even the pavements sparkle. It's a time for reflection and recuperation, for slow replenishment, for putting your house in order.
Doing those deeply unfashionable things -- slowing down, letting your spare time expand, getting enough sleep, resting -- is a radical act now, but it is essential. This is a crossroads we all know, a moment when you need to shed a skin. If you do, you'll expose all those painful nerve endings and feel so raw that you'll need to take care of yourself for a while. If you don't, then that skin will harden around you.

World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks and Other Astonishments by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

An uplifting combo of nature writing and memoir by poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil. Her father is from southern India and her mother is Filipina. Each brief chapter focuses on an animal, bird, insect or plant, linking it to her own life in some way.
Note: Ebook available through Edmonton Public Library‘s Hoopla collection.

In one chapter, the author records the questions asked by her half-white sons, ages 6 and 9, during their participation in an Audubon bird count. The following part reminds me of Mira Jacob‘s book, Good Talk:

Mommy, you are like a lady cardinal because you are brown.
Why do you have better camouflage than Daddy?
Right now, I have medium camouflage.
Will I be brown or white when I grow up?
Why do some white people not like brown people?
Don't worry Mommy. You can hide in the forest from those bad people. You have good camouflage.

Even though I spent almost a year studying whale sharks on my sabbatical, I wasn‘t prepared for the sheer size of one. I wasn‘t prepared for scores of other dangers: blacktip reef, spotted wobbegong, zebra, and sand tiger sharks. ‘All fed just before we entered the tank,‘ according to our dive master, ‘so no need to worry.‘ Of course I worried.

How to Lose Everything by Christa Couture

Christa Couture is a Cree queer woman, a Canadian broadcaster, songwriter and musician who grew up in Edmonton. A lot of personal tragedy is packed into her slim memoir, and in it she answers the question many have asked her: how do you manage to go on? This poignant book is the answer. Music and writing have saved her.

That summer, I‘d written a song about couples counselling, likening our therapist to a zookeeper and us to pacing animals.
Careful those cages aren‘t locked
Careful when the animals talk because they never lie
And the questions you‘ve been asking may need no reply

When You Trap a Tiger by Tae Keller
Audiobook [7 hr] read by Greta Jung

I hadn‘t heard of this until it was awarded the Newbery medal and it‘s great! It‘s about grief, sisters, friendship and the power of stories.
Lily's older sister calls her a QAG—Quiet Asian Girl—but Lily eventually understands that being invisible is not her superpower. She does, however, see invisible things. Things such as a tiger, who “rolled her terrible eyes and gnashed her terrible teeth.” The literary allusions are a treat, ranging from Where the Wild Things Are to Hansel and Gretel to If You Give a Mouse a Cookie to Korean mythology. The relationship dynamics within a contemporary American family of mixed ethnicity are extremely well portrayed.

I‘ve got about 20 layers of fears stacked over my heart.

Kent State by Deborah Wiles
Audiobook [2 hr] read by Christopher Gebauer, Lauren Ezzo, Christina DeLaine, Johnny Heller, Roger Wayne, Korey Jackson and David de Vries

I listened to this from Edmonton Public Library‘s Hoopla collection when I saw it won the 2021 Odyssey audiobook award. The brief book presents multiple viewpoints looking back on the murder of Kent State students by the Ohio National Guard in 1970. It‘s narrated by a full cast. I was moved to tears.

Weather by Jenny Offill

In funny and increasingly poignant snippets, this novel is Lizzie‘s internal monologue as she nearly goes out of her mind with a sense of impending doom. At work as a librarian, at home as mother of a young child, and on the streets of New York City, Lizzie worries about climate change, the results of the presidential election, and her brother who‘s addicted to narcotics and crashing on her couch. Upbeat social and political commentary.

These people long for immortality but can‘t wait ten minutes for a cup of coffee.

I buy running shoes because I want to run. This block smells like garbage. Turn left for greener streets. Yes, better. I try to run all the way to the park but these shoes don‘t work.

There are little signs everywhere in the library now that say BREATHE! BREATHE! How did everyone get so good at this breathing thing? I feel like it happened while I was away.

Memorial by Bryan Washington
Audiobook [8 hr] read by the author and Akie Kotabe

A tender novel in the voices of two gay men—one black, one Japanese American—who are figuring out whether their relationship is going towards the rocks or the open sea, while they are physically separated—one in Texas, one in Japan—and also while reckoning with their families. The interior shifts that occur while navigating rough water are portrayed with deft nuance. 

“This isn‘t a part of town that historically takes well to outsiders.”
“History changes,” I said. “It adapts.”
“In the best case scenarios,” said Ben. “ And this isn‘t a best case country.” 

A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
Audiobook [16 hr] read by Amy Landon

Intricate plotting, rich world building, and fascinating, complicated queer characters—this science fiction novel kept me awake late into the night. It‘s almost too obvious to compare it to Ann Leckie‘s Imperial Radch trilogy, since a blurb from Leckie graces the cover of some editions, but if you like stories that centre on an amazing, queer, lone representative from elsewhere who's embroiled in political intrigue, both authors will appeal. 

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

The combination of a unique voice and unusual setting captured my imagination from the start. Cheerful, practical Piranesi lives nearly all alone in a huge house, partly destroyed by the sea that swirls in and out of endless rooms full of magnificent marble statues. Birds and skeletons are his main companions, but there is one other human. Isolation during covid times has added an extra layer of relevance as I read this intriguing novel.

Birds are not difficult to understand. Their behaviour tells me what they are thinking. Generally it runs along the lines of: “Is this food? Is this? What about this? This might be food. I am almost certain that this is.” Or occasionally: “It is raining. I do not like it.”

When she was a teenager D— told a friend that she wanted to go to university to study Death, Stars and Mathematics. Inexplicably the University of Manchester didn‘t offer such a course, so she settled for Mathematics.

Not everything about the Wind was bad. Sometimes it blew through the little voids and crevices of the Statues and caused them to sing and whistle in surprising ways; I had never known the Statues to have voices before and it made me laugh for sheer delight.

The Last Brother by Nathacha Appanah
Translated from French by Geoffrey Strachan

Feelings of longing and regret permeate this lyrical novel in which a Mauritian man in his 70s looks back on the time he was 9, in 1944, when he befriended a Jewish boy who was detained with other refugees in a prison camp. All of my senses were engaged by the vivid prose. It portrays a little-known aspect of WWII in Mauritius and also showed me what things can give a child inner strength. 

This journey could have united us even more, nourished hopes of bright new dawns, we could have been pioneers, people might have spoken to us with admiration, the first family to leave Mapou entirely of their own free will, because we wanted something better, refusing to believe all the tales that said this was our destiny: rain, mud, dust and poverty. But no, we were simply a family at our wit‘s end, poleaxed by immense grief, and so we fled.

Sunlight and rain were now essential, pleasant, and gentle things, nothing like those monsters at Mapou, which overturn the earth, get into your stomach, crush your heart, and kill children.

Before going to bed I thanked god for his great kindness, for his mercy in giving us an evening without a father hammering down his hand, his feet, beside us, beside my mother, upon my mother, upon me.

[David] showed me his medallion and talked to me about the Star of David while I, poor simpleton, poor kid born in the mud, I was hopping mad. A likely story. And I suppose this forest is called the forest of Raj, eh? How could a star have his name? Could he tell me that? Did he take me for an idiot or what?
My friend gripped his star firmly and told me this David was a king. So what? Raj also meant king!

House on Endless Waters by Emuna Elon
Translated from Hebrew by Anthony Berris and Linda Yechiel

Past and present blur in this excellent novel about a Jewish Israeli writer who comes to terms with family secrets when he visits Amsterdam, the city where he was born. I felt transported to a city I love, wandering and viewing art along with the main protagonist through the museums that I also love, and which was the respite I needed from the tragic passages set during the Nazi occupation. 

Sonia goes into the house without treading on the red autumn leaves piled in the doorway. Eddy had smiled when he noticed it this morning & suggested he get a broom from their apartment and clear the way for her. But Sonia, also smiling, asked him to leave the leaves, and her, alone. This autumnal message makes me happy, she told him. And fallen leaves aren‘t dirt, Edika. You have to admit that the threshold looks much lovelier.

All these painted and sculpted mothers and infants of course depict Jesus and his mother, Mary, but before they depict Jesus and Mary they are first and foremost real infants in the arms of real mothers, and it is not difficult to see how each of the real mothers loves her infant with real love and keeps them close to her real heart, even though some of the painted infants look less like infants and more like miniaturized old men.

Avant-garde, schmavant-garde, said Bat-Ami, wrinkling her forehead as she pondered the scattering of geometric shapes through which the Russian artist had chosen to express himself. But Yoel stood before the piece ‘Black‘ and knew that this is the way he yearns to write.

The Daughters of Ys by MT Anderson and Jo Rioux

Two sisters with opposite temperaments are at the centre of this Breton dark fairytale, retold by MT Anderson. There‘s always a price to pay for magic. Jo Rioux's art, complete with sea monsters and an enchanted castle, is done in rich tones of green, gold and rust. Rioux, a cartoonist and illustrator from Ottawa, has a style that, along with the mythical subject matter, reminds me of two other cartoonists: Noelle Stevenson and Isabel Greenberg. Anderson usually writes for a younger audience, but this graphic novel is for high school age or older. 

Almost American Girl by Robin Ha

When Robin Ha was 14, she thought she and her mom were just going on vacation from Korea to the USA. Instead, it became a permanent move. In this poignant memoir in comics format, Ha documents the challenges and eventual rewards of her new life. I especially love the way her perspective on her amazing mother shifts as Ha matures.

(When she returned for a visit in 2002, the author is saddened by the ubiquity of
plastic surgery among young people in Korea.)

The Subtweet by Vivek Shraya

This was a great pick for the 200th book in my lesbian book club this month: everyone loved it. One of the many aspects we appreciated is that the trans representation is totally embedded and not in any way a conflict aspect of the storyline. The first time I read this was back in May 2020, and I was certain it would make the Giller shortlist. It's a page-turner with a believable cast of brown women and offers nuanced social commentary. I don't know why this finely-crafted Canadian novel hasn't received more attention. 

“You are not predictable and you are not controllable.”
“Damn. What is [June Jordan] talking about here?”
“Bisexuality.”
“Wow. See? These words need to soar. They can‘t be delivered in a predictable way. You have to sing them. Just try.”

Rukmini made her reflect on how much she missed not always feeling right or sure, how uncertainty was a gift that could lead to adventure or an opportunity to discover something new.

Clean by James Hamblin
Audiobook [7 hr] read by Barrett Leddy

James Hamblin is a doctor with a residency in preventive medicine, & a journalist. In Clean: The New Science of Skin, he talked to people in a wide variety of scientific disciplines as well as folks involved in beauty & grooming industries. He outlines cultural & theological meanings of cleanliness, & the ways our personal care habits affect the microbiome of our skin & our larger environment. Fascinating. 

The skin microbiome represents a new and important reason to reconsider much of the received wisdom about soap and skin care, and to think deliberately about the daily habits many of us undertake in pursuit of health or wellbeing.