I love seeing end-of-year reading lists.
What did readers love best? What moved them? Which characters, which books, what language rattled or pleased or disrupted the equilibrium of their everyday literary lives? What are they saying about the castles of words these authors so laboriously built? What are they recommending? Who and what and where should I turn to read a story that will change my life?
Virginia Woolf said that reading is, at its core, a mere matter of knowing the alphabet—but “to read a book well, one should read it as if one were writing it. Begin not by sitting on the bench among the judges but by standing in the dock with the criminal. Be his fellow worker, become his accomplice. Even, if you wish merely to read books, begin by writing them.”1
For me, reading stems from a single, simple desire: I want to be among the books.
I don’t mean just physically (although the piles in my apartment are ever-growing, assuming tabletops and floor space, and soon I’ll have to be more selective about what I bring home, conceding to my fiancé’s concern that it’s getting slightly out of hand). I want to lose my compass, find myself lost inside a forest of words. I want to be startled. I would like a book to challenge everything I thought I knew about storytelling—Suzanne by Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, Bear by Marian Engel, and The Liberators by E.J. Koh, in the recent past, have had this effect on me. I enjoy it when a book stuns me, when I need to set it down in astonishment: they just did that. Claudia Dey says that she loves “to hold a book and feel it as sentient. I believe a book, like a song, should be a bodily experience. It should enter your blood stream and rearrange you.”
Year-end lists are largely wonderful: they inspire conversation, drive book sales, increase readership, and encourage community. But what, apart from personal taste, dictates what “the best” is, especially on platforms like Instagram or Tik-Tok or Goodreads, where any and everybody can be a critic?
After all, reading fiction and poetry is like listening to a dream. A dreamer (the author) can relate what they’ve experienced to an outsider—in this case, the reader— but that person will never see the colours, smell the wind, or hear the voices in the same manner as the dreamer. The person listening to the dream receives a new experience. They envision the landscape, watch the cattle graze, drink the milkshake, burrow their toes into sand on a different beach than the dream’s author, in another pasture, at a McDonald’s rather than in a dimly lit countryside roadhouse. The flavours will vary (chocolate vs. strawberry), dialogue and characters will affect one person differently than they will another, but for the most part when it comes to dreaming, the dreamer and their audience can agree on whether a dream is objectively, and overall, “good” or “bad”. The same cannot be said for a book, because to it we will apply our own experiences, emotions, and judgements—for better or worse, and sometimes to the detriment of the book’s author.
From Virginia Woolf’s wonderful How Should One Read a Book?:
[I]f to read a book as it should be read calls for the rarest qualities of imagination, insight, and judgment, you may perhaps conclude that literature is a very complex art and that it is unlikely that we shall be able, even after a lifetime of reading, to make any valuable contribution to its criticism. We must remain readers; we shall not put on the further glory that belongs to those rare beings who are also critics. But still we have our responsibilities as readers and even our importance. The standards we raise and the judgments we pass steal into the air and become part of the atmosphere which writers breathe as they work. An influence is created which tells upon them even if it never finds its way into print. And that influence, if it were well instructed, vigorous and individual and sincere, might be of great value now when criticism is necessarily in abeyance; when books pass in review like the procession of animals in a shooting gallery, and the critic has only one second in which to load and aim and shoot and may well be pardoned if he mistakes rabbits for tigers, eagles for barndoor fowls, or misses altogether and wastes his shot upon some peaceful cow grazing in a further field. If behind the erratic gunfire of the press the author felt that there was another kind of criticism, the opinion of people reading for the love of reading, slowly and unprofessionally, and judging with great sympathy and yet with great severity, might this not improve the quality of his work? And if by our means books were to become stronger, richer, and more varied, that would be an end worth reaching.
It’s fair to say that no two readers experience the same book. I return to this passage from Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing by Margaret Atwood often: “The printed text of a book is like a musical score, which is not itself music, but becomes music when played by musicians, or ‘interpreted’ by them, as we say. The act of reading a text is like playing music and listening to it at the same time, and the reader becomes his own interpreter.”
There’s also a quote by Sandra Cisneros that I love and prefaced my 2022 “favourite books” list with: “I don’t believe in ‘best of’ books. It creates a hierarchy, and books are not hierarchy, books are medicine. We read what we need to heal us.”
That’s all these lists can ever be: an accumulation of not “the best”, but our favourite reads, the books that touched us in some individual, significant way. Echoing Atwood’s sentiment, Rebecca Solnit mused, “The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the symphony resounds, the seed germinates. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.”
One last quote from Woolf:
It is true that we get nothing whatsoever except pleasure from reading; it is true that the wisest of us is unable to say what that pleasure may be. But that pleasure—mysterious, unknown, useless as it is—is enough. That pleasure is so curious, so complex, so immensely fertilizing to the mind of anyone who enjoys it, and so wide in its effects, that it would not be in the least surprising to discover, on the day of judgment when secrets are revealed and the obscure is made plain, that the reason why we have grown from pigs to men and women, and come out from our caves, and dropped our bows and arrows, and sat round the fire and talked and drunk and made merry and given to the poor and helped the sick and made pavements and houses and erected some sort of shelter and society on the waste of the world, is nothing but this: we have loved reading.
In the spirit of Cisneros’ belief, this year I’m not going to share a list of books that I thought were “best” (who am I to say what the best is, especially when I haven’t read as widely and deeply as I would have liked to this year?), but rather a selection of passages from novels that I’ve enjoyed, sentences that have stopped me in my tracks and delivered on that mysterious factor I’m searching for when reading: to be startled, changed.
I know I’m missing sentences—entire books even—that I’ve loved this year, but here’s the ultimate magic: as readers we are constantly rediscovering and reinterpreting texts, coming back to them. What you underline or dog-ear the first time around may hold little reverence during the second read, but the underlined text acts as a marker for who you, the reader, once was. Your pencil will find new sentences to adore. A cactus, a shadow, a road overlooked during the initial reading will uncover meaning in the future. A good sentence possesses the power to align the stars, inspire breakthrough, unlock the mysteries of the universe. You will inherit books from other readers, texts highlighted by a ghost hand—these are the purest of treasures: books passed along, well-loved and well-read, for storytelling has always been human’s greatest tradition. And that’s why, ultimately, I enjoy these end-of-year lists. Most of us know we’re not definitively ranking books—it doesn’t have to be that serious. We’re readers, as Virginia says, in love with the written word.
I have been fortunate to receive books from publishers and publicists this year. I’m grateful each time someone offers to send me their book, any time I request a copy and am told “yes”. I would like to warmly acknowledge the wonderful people responsible for placing books into the hands of readers—librarians, book store owners, book clubs, publicists, agents, editors. And, as always, my respect and gratitude to the authors who toil away for mysterious hours (months, years!) on end, creating these fantastic worlds, crafting sentences and characters that transport readers. There is nothing else to be said but thank you.
To those working from the anonymity of their desks, whose words have not yet been read: remember that with time and perseverance, you will get there. The shelf holds space for you.
Wisdom from Zadie Smith: “When I’m reading I consider it an activity as difficult as writing. . . it’s a challenge to your whole self. I love writing that is respectful of the human capacity to understand.”
With that said, here are a few of the sentences and passages I’ve been dazzled by this year. I love them for what they convey, how they exceed and defy the norm, for their structure, for the questions posed and images conjured. I hope you’ll enjoy reading them and will consider supporting your local book store if you decide to buy a copy.
TO THE FOREST, Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette:
“I want to be outdoors, to have no outlines or edges, to not be held back in any way.”
“That one day it would be my turn to take the baton and choose what could emerge from the chaos.”
“I use my clovers as bookmarks, and they are the miniature umbrellas of the authors who are a breath of air for me. This morning, I curl up against Anaïs Nin, and she smells good. She smells like skin.
Every man brings out new emotions in her, new ideas, each relationship gives rise to a new universe. A new Anaïs.
‘Every Anaïs exists only for the one who revealed her, while drawing inspiration from all the others.’ I am now alone with her; I close my eyes and rest my forehead against Anaïs Nin. I want to kiss her right now.”
“I remember a bird. We give our pain at random to whatever can carry it.”
THIRST FOR SALT, Madelaine Lucas:
“I was asking a question about fertility, which is to ask a question about time.”
“I suppose I’d been playing, the way I did sometimes when I was out there alone—making arcs, pointing my feet like a dancer—because in the water I could love my body the way I never did on land.”
“I met boys like that later—loved them, even—who courted poverty, donned it like a chic secondhand coat.”
“For though she had often spoken to me frankly about her own desires, those flights of passion had ended in the drama and violence of birth—my mother twice split apart and stitched back together, first with me, in the traditional fashion with the intervention of metal forceps, and then with Henry, from sternum to navel, because he was breech and carried high—she did not like it if I talked that way.”
“But that summer the blood would come, and I would stay stranded on the shore, watching the other children swim because my body was a wound, I was a woman now.”
LANDSCAPES, Christine Lai:
“I remember the extraordinary green of his eyes, like crushed malachite.”
“For a while, the ruins were the city’s greatest spectacle.”
“Nature is a brilliant sculptor, she once told me.”
“I walk against the tide of well-dressed office workers.”
“I once read somewhere that being desired is the closest a mortal can feel to being immortal.”
“Remembering is akin to the process of pouring plaster into the lacunae made by time and catastrophe. We tip words and images into the moulds of the past, but what emerges, when the container is cracked open, does not approximate the living thing that once existed. The reconstructed form can never be more than a petrified copy of the breathing, trembling whole.”
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF SKIN, Lakiesha Carr:
“Maya felt her body had become a ripe piece of fruit, bruised and soft in places where it shouldn’t be. Some exported good that had been grown in a foreign land once called home then sent away and sold.”
“And then there was the condition of her heart. She couldn’t decide if it was breaking or broken.”
“No one knew how angry she was. The world continued to move and she was but a small thing on it. No one understood how the television haunted her. Shot dead. Strung up from trees. Dead. Walking home. Dead. Coming home from the store. Dead.”
“Humanity is the most exquisite magic, she said, spitting into her cup.”
“The way to beat them, she concluded, was to become as scary as they felt. Be the fear. Let the curls atop her head run as wild as her mother’s, dry as the perfect conditions for a forest fire. Become the fire. Reach up when they reached down. Be the mystery, as unpredictable as life. Do not smile. Move the thickness of her lips up and out. Fill the eyes with hot water. Lava. Become a volcano. Become the ocean, the unexplored depths.
Be women. Be Black.”
DAUGHTER, Claudia Dey:
“Love in my body felt different from the love I read about. Love in my body felt like getting knifed.”
“A wing was named for her family. The ends of her fingers were clean.”
“Paul stood by in Spain when Cherry screamed at me and sprayed me with a garden hose like an unwanted animal.”
“After a pause, Wes said, What does evil think it is? I mean who is she to herself? And sand is not rock, Cherry. Sand is the end of rock. . . Like is your father a captive or a mastermind?”
“When I left your mother, I left behind my gift.”
“The nurse then came in and they explained that volunteers knit things for the babies in this ward, and we dressed the baby in a little crocheted suit and hat, and we took photos of him. Then they told me that it was time, he was beginning to turn, to change, they said, it was time, and they took him away.”
“He wanted to make a gift of her anguish because there was nothing more threatening than a woman who knows her own mind, then decides to die by it.”
“For Sigrid, Paul’s voice was an insemination, his voice filled her body, it entered her bloodstream and her cells.”
“Ani says that when a white man is described as a genius, even once, he can get away with anything including murder. I mean in terms of examples where do I even start, Ani said.”
THE GUEST, Emma Cline:
“Alex wanted to take the whole money clip, but restraint was a good thing. Always. Hadn’t the other girls taught her that? To never take enough that you couldn’t call the guy again, never fleece him so badly that he cut off the relationship entirely. People, it turned out, were mostly fine with being victimized in small doses. In fact, they seemed to expect a certain amount of deception, allowed for a tolerable margin of manipulation in their relationships.”
BLUE HOUR, Tiffany Clarke Harrison:
“I’m Black, Haitian, Japanese. So now that we’ve got our census information out of the way, where would you like to start?”
“A little boy holds on to his father, legs and arms wrapped around him as they flee. The father, his eyes red and tearing, mere slits in his panicked face, grips the boy in a full embrace, squeezes him to his chest. Is he crying from tear gas? Or are they actual tears? Because he knows he can never fully protect the child. None of us can. We can barely protect ourselves.”
THE YOUNG MAN, Annie Ernaux:
“I felt as if I had been lying on a bed since age eighteen and never risen from it—the same bed but in different places, with different men, indistinguishable from one another.”
“My main reason for wanting our story to continue was that, in a sense, it was already over and I was a fictional character within it.”
“But, looking at this older couple, I knew that if I was with a twenty-five-year-old man, it was so that I would not continually be looking at the timeworn face of a man my age, the face of my own aging. When A.’s face was before me, mine was young too. Men have known this forever, and I saw no reason to deprive myself.”
STUDY FOR OBEDIENCE, Sarah Bernstein:
“I attended to their every desire, smoothed away the slightest discomfort with perfect obedience, with the highest degree of devotion, so that over time their desires became mine, so that I came to anticipate wants not yet articulated, perhaps not even yet imagined, providing my siblings with the greatest possible succour, filling them up only so they could demand more, always more, demands to which I acceded with alacrity and discreet haste, ministering the compact curative draughts prescribed to them by various doctors, serving their meals and snacks, their cigarettes and aperitifs, their nightcaps and bedside glasses of milk.”
“I felt the cold ground of the kitchen garden give beneath me as I knelt down, so many hours spent weeding, mending the fences and darning the netting that cradled the winter crops. I untangled the tender leafy greens from the vine plants that had grown around them, wondering about the lives of cabbages, their hearts and their vitality. They did not know, how could they, the care and attention with which I applied myself to them, and I loved them for that, the essential mystery of their being, no exposition possible, no question of knowing or being known, the beautiful, the unthinkable cabbages! . . . Do you understand what I am saying? Beauty is something meant to be eaten: it is a food.”
MERMAIDS AND IKONS: A GREEK SUMMER, Gwendolyn MacEwen:
“…we seemed to be suspended in a hunk of purple midnight space.”
“I wanted everything; I wanted to be enormous and overwhelming, yawning and expansive like the light.”
“I can’t be sure, but I’m going by the feeling that certain days have certain colours, and this was a blonde day—dusty blonde, to be more precise. The air smelled of ancient, unknown flowers, and all the cicadas were singing like mad in the groves in the hollows of the hills.”
THE LIBERTATORS, E.J. Koh:
“The coroner excused himself and was heading for the door when he glimpsed for the first time how the world did not break all at once but started to crack just as it was doing across the lovely face of that man’s daughter, like madness, like euphoria.”
“They commented on the delicate timbre of his voice—Christlike, swaddled in fine tones.”
“If it was Korean to love even the terrible parts, and to call these things love, then maybe I was American.”
“We stripped and bore the wind and its cursive around us.”
“The way a ship sinks in compartments, from one partition to another, was the way a country sank.”
“The sunrise belonged to me as did the children’s feet slap-slapping the pavement. Plum leaves dappled the sidewalk. Moths rested on the window. Light patterned the ceiling like tide pools . . . At night, I admired the precise right angle of the light from the streetlamp falling over my sill. Crickets chirped louder when the sprinklers came on. I dragged myself as a lump into my sheets. I wanted time to fly like an arrow across my life.”
This feels like a gift itself. I can’t wait to find a long moment and read this more carefully. Thank you