Not that anyone reading this needs convincing, about how diverse the offerings are on library shelves, but just imagine the dramatically different reading moods each of these four books requires! All of these books were already on my TBR, but the Toronto Public Library Reading Challenge gave me the incentive to pull them off the shelf and into my stack.
A Book by a Caribbean Author: Charmaine Wilkerson’s Black Cake (2022)
This debut novel landed on my TBR thanks to a juicy little blurb by Dawnie Walton (whose The Final Revival of Opal & Nev was a favourite in 2021) and thanks to years of eating Black Cake from the Farmers’ Market over the winter holidays. The short chapters conspire with equal parts story and characterisation to make this a true pageturner for those who enjoy family secret sagas. The California parts are set in the present; the story set in the islands unfolds in the past. There’s cake in both story lines. (I haven’t watched the show yet, but I’m keen.)
“Byron’s parents always said the islands as if they were the only ones in the world. There are roughly two thousand islands in the world’s oceans and that’s not counting the millions of other bits of land surrounded by seas and other bodies of water.”
A Non-Fiction Book by an Indigenous Author: Angela Sterritt’s Unbroken (2023)
The library copy is worn for the first four chapters but the binding seems pristine past that—it’s not an easy read, and it shouldn’t be—but Angela Sterritt’s book is essential reading for anyone who follows the work of Indigenous journalists and writers like Tanya Talaga and Connie Walker, for anyone concerned with justice.
It’s subtitled: My Fight for Survival, Hope, and Justice for Indigenous Women and Girls. Her motivation in sharing her personal story is to illuminate how uniquely vulnerable are Indigenous women and girls, how easily her own story could have had a tragic ending.
Gladys Radek, a Gitxsan and Wet-suwet-en advocate for MMIWG, counted more than 4,000 Missing/Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls by 2013. “How many more serial killers will we learn about and when are we going to find our women?” she asks.
Sterritt traces the public interest in the story back to the local journalist Lindsay Kines’ work in “Police Target Big Increase in Missing Women Cases” (a story which ran in July 1998 in Vancouver), through what’s known as the Pickton trial, and through Commissioner Wally Oppal’s 1,448-page report Forsaken: The Report of the Missing Women Commission of Inquiry. That report explored reasons why individual investigations stalled and failed, which led to the formation of the National Inquiry in 2016.
All of this is exceptionally interesting if you followed the media at that time, can sense just how much was left untold. The “Highway of Tears” documentary is recommended too. I still think about parts of that film, so many years late.
“When I started my book in 2015, ‘racism’ was a no-no to talk about in the journalism industry. In 2017, ‘colonialization’ was questioned in my stories. In 2019, journalists were not to give the reality of ‘genocide’ in Canada any weight. In 2021, all these rules begin to break.”
A Book about Politics: Sevgi Soysal’s Dawn (1975; Translated by Maureen Freely, 2022)
This landed in my stacks because of this review, but I had forgotten that when I actually started reading! Does this happen to you, too? So I wasn’t attuned to the parallels between the author’s and narrator’s experiences. (Here’s a link to The Nation’s review, in case the NYT’s is behind a pay-wall.)
It read very slowly for me, partly because there are several perspectives to track and it takes time for one character to become central, and partly because the dinner party’s attendees are arrested early in the novel, so most of the novel is painful reading.
Having said that, I haven’t read much Turkish fiction, so I found it fascinating. (And, of course, anyone who’s as smitten by Archipelago as I am, you’ll have recognised its quality straight away.)
A Book with a Long Title: Quan Barry’s When I’m Gone, Look for Me in the East (2022)
The funnest category so far! I’ve done a lot of challenges, but I think this is the first time this idea has come up. There were three contenders in my stack (but far more one-word titles overall).
Quan Barry was born in Saigon, now lives in the United States, and she’s published four volumes of poetry and two other novels. HAve you ever her before? I’d love to hear where you think I should head next.
WIGLFMitE is set in Mongolia and revolves around the journey of two men, twins, in the present-day. Because they’re travelling, there’s good reason to reflect on the landscape (gorgeous, haunting) and, because they’re moving through areas of historical importance, there’s opportunity to relay the colonial impact of Russian/Soviet power on the people (including some discussion of the oft-overlooked Indigenous population there).
Chapters are usually two pages long, but dense with detail, including existential and spiritual questions, which suits the story but also slowed my pace.
“Because of the work of your grandfather, today there are copies of The Secret History of the Mongols all over the world. It is the history of our people. The Mongol people come from a line of warriors. Your grandfather pays a heavy price. If I know anything, I know he would pay it again.”
Are you bored of reading about this reading challenge?
Don’t worry—I’ll just write about it once more, at the end of the year, when it’s (HOPEFULLY!) complete.
But I hope you’re not bored of hearing about the library, cuz this is one of several posts in response to Bookish Beck’s #LoveYourLibrary event (the last Monday of each month).
Which of these have you read? Or, which other book have you read that would fit one of these categories?
Archipelago does fantastic books! I love that they are usually square. I’ve not read Dawn, but I do have a small and growing collection from the publisher that I look forward to diving into one of these days 🙂
A Year of Archipelagos would make an excellent project! Their subscription is quite reasonable in my opinion, for U.S. residents anyway; for them to ship across the border more than doubles the cost (not that I think we should deny the true cost of transport of course, not in this climate crisis).
Never bored of hearing about the library!
I’ve heard Barry’s We Ride Upon Sticks is good.
I don’t have the zest for reading challenges but I enjoy hearing about other people’s!
I see that I’ve got that one on my “Saved” shelf at the library: thank you!
Challenges are rare for me now, too, but I wanted to see if I could actually finish this one, because I’ve left it partially finished for so many years that it annoyed me.
I was thinking of you last night while reading one of Ross Gay’s “delights”.
I’ve given up responding to challenges, but I could probably manage this one (thanks to you and Naomi).
My only ‘Caribbean’ is Nalo Hopkinson, though I do have a boys’ book about Haiti, Blackbird Patrol by Andrew Wood (which of course takes a resolutely British perspective).
I’ve read one Tanya Talaga (and also Mini Aodla Freeman’s memoir). On Twitter I follow some (Australian) Indigenous women in the anti-prisons movement who point out just how many reports of missing Aboriginal women are ignored by the police, and how many of the women subsequently turn up murdered.
Politics, that’s harder, though many of my Africa reads this year have politics running along in the background. Let’s say Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King.
Long book names are generally annoying, especially when you’re reviewing them. But as we’re both reading Binyavanga Wainaina’s One Day I will write about this Place, that will do.
Tanya Talaga’s new book is hard to resist right now (there’s also a series broadcasting on CBC TV that corresponds, but likely isn’t available overseas).
I think The Shadow King is a great selection for that category (and it also fits with the convo in your recent comment section about when historical fiction resonates with you and when it doesn’t).
Oh, yes, the Binyavanga Wainaina memoir would have been PERFECT. I mean, I can’t complain, because it’s good to ‘discover’ two ‘new’ authors rather than just one, but that would have been an excellent option.
Thanks for joining in! I can see why you couldn’t resist the library challenge. I’d been wondering about Black Cake and it does sound like something I’d enjoy.
I forgot to send you the link this time, but you’re quick! It reminded me a little of another siblings-in-the-wake-of-grief story that we both read last year (by an American woman, I think you liked it a little more, and maybe it had a bright cover? lol); I liked Black Cake’s rotating perspectives, but the loss-secrets-acceptance story is familiar by now.