Mid-way through February, not one book in my reading log for this year bears a 2015 publication date. Not even 2014. The book published most recently was Carla Gunn’s Amphibian, from Coach House Books in 2009. Although I’m not exactly pulling Ovid and Milton, Aphra Behn or Jane Austen from the shelves either. The earliest publication date for my reading year so far is Gabrielle Roy’s 1951 novel, Where Nests the Water Hen.
Perhaps that’s why, although there are a lot of quotes from Dawn Powell’s diaries interspersed (as are here), the bulk of my notebook in recent weeks has been devoted to recent booklists, from the CBC Bookie award lists, the ReLit award lists, and The Morning News Tournament of Books list. New books, shiny temptations.
(With the exception of the CBC Canada Reads titles — a couple of which are more Amphibian-vintage, though nothing even close to Water-Hen-vintage — all of these are 2013/2014 works, the perfect temptation for my backlist focus.)
2015 CBC Bookie Awards (Votes are accepted until February 23rd, here.) [Edited to add a link to the winners, here.]
Biblioasis, 2014
Fiction:
Ben Lerner’s 10:04
✔Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing
✔Miriam Toews’ All My Puny Sorrows
Dinaw Mengestu’s All Our Names
✔K.D. Miller’s All Saints
Non-Fiction:
Alison Pick’s Between Gods: A Memoir
Kathleen Winter’s Boundless: Tracing Land and Dream in a New Northwest Passage
Michael Harris’ The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection
Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate
✔Edmund Metatawabin’s Up Ghost River: A Chief’s Journey through the Turbulent Waters of Native History
Poetry:
Don McKay’s Angular Unconfirmity
Adam Sol’s Complicity
Arleen Pare’s Lake of Two Mountains
Ken Babstock’s On Malice
Karen Enns’ Ordinary Hours
Thriller/Horror/Mystery/Crime:
Linwood Barclay’s No Safe House
✔Linden MacIntyre’s Punishment
Louise Penny’s The Long Way Home
✔Nick Cutter’s The Troop
✔Russell Wangersky’s Walt
Sci-Fi/Fantasy:
Peter Watts’ Echopraxia
Dave Duncan’s Queen of Stars
✔Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven
William Gibson’s The Peripheral
✔Kelley Armstrong’s Visions
House of Anansi, 2014
Young Adult:
✔Sarah Ellis’ Outside In
Kenneth Oppel’s The Boundless
Jonathan Auxier’s The Night Gardener
✔Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki’s This One Summer
Raziel Reid’s When Everything Feels like the Movies
Short Stories:
✔K.D. Miller’s All Saints
Rivka Galchen’s American Innovations
✔Mireille Silcoff’s Chez L’Arabe
✔Kathy Page’s Paradise & Elsewhere
✔Margaret Atwood’s Stone Mattress
Picture Books:
Marie-Louise Gay’s Any Questions?
Chieri Uegaki’s Hana Hashimoto, Sixth Violin (Illus. Qin Leng)
David J. Smith’s If: A Mind-Bending Way of Looking at Big Ideas and Numbers (Illus. Steve Adams)
Kyo Maclear’s Julia, Child (Illus. Julie Morstad)
Christine Baldacchino’s Moris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress (Illus. Isabelle Malenfant)
Graphic Novel or Graphic Memoir:
Julie Delporte’s Everywhere Antennas
Cory Doctorow and Jen Wang’s In Real Life
Pascal Giraud’s Petty Theft
Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Seconds
✔Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki’s This One Summer
International Fiction:
Ben Lerner’s 10:04
✔Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing
Dinaw Mengestu’s All Our Names
✔Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird
David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks
Groundwood, 2014
International Non-Fiction:
Roxanne Gay’s Bad Feminist
Thomas Pikeyy’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Trans. Arthur Goldhammer)
Michael Lewis’ Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt
Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
Meghan Daum’s The Unspeakable
2014 ReLit Awards
2014 Novels:
Savage 1986-2011, Nathaniel G. Moore (Anvil)
Rogue Cells/ Carbon Harbour, Garry Thomas Morse (Talonbooks)
✔Miracle of Ordinary Men, Amanda Leduc (ECW)
Burning From the Inside, Christine Walde (DCB)
The Strangers’ Gallery, Paul Bowdring (Vagrant)
Sneaker Wave, Jeff Beamish (Oolichan)
Anatomy of a Girl Gang, Ashley Little (Arsenal Pulp)
✔Caught, Lisa Moore (Anansi)
Paradise Revisited, Shane Joseph (Blue Denim Press)
✔Say Nothing Saw Wood, Joel Thomas Hynes (Running the Goat)
✔Infidelity, Stacey May Fowles (ECW)
The Alphabet Stones, Ursula Pflug (Blue Denim Press)
Fallsy Downsies, Stephanie Domet (Invisible)
✔The Desperates, Greg Kearney (Cormorant)
Every Little Thing, Chad Pelley (Breakwater)
Juanita Wildrose My True Life, Susan Downe (Pedlar)
2014 Stories:
Auxiliary Skins, Christine Miscione (Exile)
Arbeiter Ring Publishing, 2014
Dear Leaves I Miss You, Sara Heinonen (Mansfield)
All We Want is Everything, Andrew F. Sullivan (ARP Books)
The Critic and Other Stories, Martin Hunter (Cormorant)
After it Rains, Bill Haugland (Vehicule)
Someone Somewhere, Dana Mills (Gaspereau)
You Haven’t Changed a Bit, Astrid Blodgett (UOA Pres)
The Other Side of Youth, Kelli Deeth (Arsenal Pulp)
Exceptions & Deceptions, Cliff Burns (Black Dog Press)
Keeping the Peace, Colette Maitland (Biblioasis)
They Never Told Me, Austin Clarke (Exile)
Life Without Death, Peter Unwin (Cormorant)
✔Islands of Decolonial Love, Leanne Simpson (ARP Books)
✔Red Girl Rat Boy, Cynthia Flood (Biblioasis)
2014 Poetry:
Placeholder, Charmaine Cadeau (Brick)
The Ends of the Earth, Jacqueline Turner (ECW)
Monkey Soap, Glen Downie (Mansfield)
Forge, Kevin McPherson Eckhoff (Invisible)
The Sea with No One in it, Niki Koulouris (Porcupine’s Quill)
Liquidities, Daphne Marlatt (Talon)
Coping with Emotions and Otters, Dina Del Bucchia (Talonbooks)
When This World Comes to an End, Kate Cayley (Brick)
How Poetry Saved My Life, Amber Dawn (Arsenal Pulp)
Knife Throwing Through Self-Hypnosis, Robin Richardson (ECW)
The Family China, Ann Shin (Brick)
Love’s Not the Way to, Stan Rogal (BookLand)
The Polymers, Adam Dickinson (Anansi)
Hard Ass, Sharon McCartney (Palimpsest)
The Lost Letters, Catherine Greenwood (Brick)
The Cockeyed World, Jim Christy (Guernica)
For Display Purposes Only, David Seymour (Coach House)
Multitudes, Margaret Christakos (Coach House)
Complete Surprising Fragments of Improbable Books, Stephen Brockwell (Mansfield)
What the World Said, Jason Camlot (Mansfield)
A Pretty Sight, David O’Meara (Coach House)
Our Days in Vaudeville, Stuart Ross (Mansfield)
2015 The Morning News Tournament of Books
Silence Once Begun by Jesse Ball
A Brave Man Seven Storeys Tall by Will Chancellor
✔All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Harper Collins, 2012
Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante
An Untamed State by Roxane Gay
Wittgenstein Jr by Lars Iyer
A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James
Redeployment by Phil Klay
✔Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell
Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng
Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill
✔Adam by Ariel Schrag
The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters
Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld
2015 CBC Canada Reads
✔And the Birds Rained Down by Jocelyne Saucier (Trans. Rhonda Mullins)
✔Intolerable: A Memoir of Extremes by Kamal Al-Solaylee
✔Ru by Kim Thúy (Trans. Sheila Fischman)
✔The Inconvenient Indian by Thomas King
When Everything Feels Like the Movies by Raziel Reid
Are you scribbling big reading plans in your notebook?
Do they seem to have any bearing on the books in your current reading?
(Only two of them are actually in my current stack of reads, and it’s harder to explain how the other dozen books got there.)
Are you following any of these events in particular, vaguely or diligently?
This list makes me miss CanLit desperately. So hard to find most of them in the American public library system…
And I would think, given your location, that you’d have a better chance of finding them in your library system than in many other areas. Should I whisper so you can’t hear all this Canlit chatter? 😉
[…] Buried in Print talks about some book awards lists like the CBC Bookie Awards […]
I’m following all of these rather vaguely — I’ve read a few of these titles here and there — if you’re wanting to read some nonfiction for the Bookies next, I can highly recommend Alison Pick’s Between Gods. So very, very raw. I loved it.
BTW, speaking of book awards and so forth, have you seen the new Evergreen Award nominee list? It’s a ‘people’s choice’ kind of award administered by the Ontario Library Association (I am on their committee so it’s top of mind for me!)
Although my intentions were specific, my attentions are vague. Even though I’ve enjoyed Alison Pick’s poetry and her fiction, I haven’t felt drawn to Between Gods, so I do appreciate your encouragement. I will take a peek after all.
Thanks for sharing the link to the Evergreen list. I immediately added it to my notebook as well. A couple of the titles (the Fred Stenson and the Naomi Klein) have been pressing to be read anyhow, so perhaps this is the nudge I need, another reading project! Are you reading through them all or have you already done so?