There is an author’s note at the end of This Time Tomorrow in which Emma Straub explains how the inspiration for this novel came from her relationship with her own father. At the end of the author’s note she writes, “I hope that you enjoyed the book and that it made you cry.” I did enjoy This Time Tomorrow, but it did not make me cry, which made me realize how much I do not relate to the protagonist of this story.
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You know I like stories about witches, and Cherie Dimaline’s VenCo is a fun story about witches working together to take down the patriarchy. This novel is a real treat to read.
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Like Pip Williams’s first novel, The Dictionary of Lost Words, The Bookbinder is great for fans of historical fiction. You should definitely read it if you have read The Dictionary of Lost Words. The Bookbinder is also set in Oxford during the early twentieth century and focuses on the suffrage movement in England and WWI. Some characters from The Dictionary of Lost Words make an appearance in this novel.
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For the first third of Susan Rieger’s Like Mother, Like Mother, I thought, this book is fun and entertaining, which feels like a weird thing to think about a novel that is about generational trauma. But then the story took a shift in tone that felt inauthentic to me, and I ended up feeling cynical towards this novel.
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The Inconvenient Indian is a great book if you are looking for an introduction to the history of the relationship between Indigenous people and white people in Canada and the US. For someone like me who has already read many different books about Indigenous people, The Inconvenient Indian is just a broad level look at this relationship and does not really examine how it affects Indigenous people on an individual level.
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2025 is off to a good start in terms of my reading. Chris Whitaker’s All the Colors of the Dark is a very slow-burn story about missing girls and a serial killer. Some people might not like how slowly the story moves along, but I think this novel is great and I spent a lazy Sunday afternoon powering through this book to its satisfying conclusion.
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Another year done and dusted. Not feeling great about the next four years, so I think I am just going to bury my head in books. Before I get to that, though, I am going to share my top five books of 2024:
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Loghan Paylor is a queer and trans Canadian author who has written a pleasant albeit predictable story about queer love set during the World War II era. The Cure for Drowning is a good novel and worth reading, but I can’t say that this novel really excites me.
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George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo is a well-received, Man Booker Prize winning novel about the death of Abraham Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son, Willie, and how Willie ends up in the bardo between life and death. It sounds like an interesting read, but I wish I had taken a moment to flip through the pages before buying this book because I do not like how it was written.
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After reading Richard Powers’ The Overstory, I needed something less heavy to read, so I thought Marissa Stapley’s The Lightning Bottles would do the trick, however, it ended up getting me riled up about society’s internalized misogyny. The Lightning Bottles is specifically about misogyny in the music industry, but I think it is a good book for music lovers, particularly if you have an appreciation for the Seattle grunge scene of the 1990s.
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