Past the mid-point of the reading year, I notice that there are some books I finished reading some time ago, lingering. Just, around. Left in innocuous places as though I just finished reading them there. Finally, when I found a place for Khadija Abdalla Bajaber’s novel (on the shelf with my Ursula K. Le Guin’s and my Octavia Butler’s) I realised that, even though I’d finished reading them, I wasn’t finished with them. Either I wanted to share the book with a particular reader (like Wanda’s War) or I felt as though I had something to say but hadn’t found the words yet (like Tali Girls and, fortunately Joe did the heavy lifting).

Kim McLarin’s essays pull me in immediately; her tone is conversational and smart, and I find her slyly funny (sometimes a little self-deprecating but mostly simply self-aware, in a way I find relatable). Her collection Womanish was a favourite read and, when I heard about this her new book, I literally marked the publication date on my calendar. (This does not happen as often as you might think!)

She writes about everyday life and her view of it is naturally political. Sometimes she seems to speak directly to you. Other times her tone is more sculpted, feels more distant (there’s an actual convocation address, for instance).

She’s inspirational in a way you wouldn’t guess from this essay title: “On Learning to Ride a Motorcycle after Fifty and Other Pursuits.” (Spoiler: she fails the class, and learns something else along the way.)

The words of her literary ancestors saturate her work, and I absolutely love feeling as though I’m in her company:

“‘I am not the victim here,’ said James Baldwin. Damn right.
Put another way: this is for colored girls who have considered suicide and might consider it still, but who sure as hell are not gonna let y’all take us out.”

We could also vacation together: “Each of us would rather lick the handrails in the Pairs Metro than take a cruise or spend a week at a Caribbean resort.” And I wish I could have taken one of her classes, because I had to discover these readers and thinkers independently too: “My Black students express mostly disappointment and bewilderment. Why weren’t they taught about David Walker and Maria Stewart and Claude McKay? Why have they never heard of Harriet Jacobs or Frances Harper or even Audre Lorde!” (Here’s a link to IGPublishing. You’re welcome.)

Jo Gatford’s The Woman’s Part (2022) is one of those books you simply know you’ll reread the next time you browse that shelf. Or, the kind you’ll go searching for, after you’ve rewatched (or attended) a Shakespeare play.

She arranges her book in five acts, writes what feels like a prose poem, then creates an erasure poem out of a scene from the same play. The format, itself, is part of the pleasure: this sense of summary, the bare-boned-ness of the erasure poem (recreated afterwards without linebreaks, like a proper poem on its own merits). Not knowing all the characters very well is unimportant; there are so many recognizable themes and realities evident in her interpretation of women’s lives.

From Emilia in “Othello”, for instance, about what it would have been like if the women could have banded together, Desdemona in company, rather than alone, vulnerable.

“She would have taught the girl to lie, first off. Taught
her a lot of things she wished she’d known before. How
to be unseen. How to be so unimportant no one even
notices. How to disappear completely and begin again,
just the two of them, somewhere far from men who
can’t even trust the insides of their own heads.”

Or about how things might have turned out differently if Cordelia had maintained her silence in “King Lear”: “But Cordelia speaks. And this time, she says everything. Because truth’s a dog that slips the leash and she has a tale to tell.”

These prose poems are directly engaging, but the erasure poems are unexpectedly beautiful in this snazzy little volume from Stanchion Zine (also available for $4, in PDF). It’s hard to believe there’s something else meaningful underneath all that black ink.

You know when you finish reading a book, and you think to yourself that it’s very likely to be a true standout in your reading year?

Siamak Herawi’s Tali Girls (2018; Trans. Sara Khalili, 2023) gave me that feeling, but on the scale of a decade, not just a year.

Truly unforgettable, intelligent and tender: Joe @ RoughGhosts has described it perfectly here.

“Our parents will not change. Remember the proverb about the fox that was born in a well and believed it was the entire world? Well, to them Tali is the entire world.”

Marsha Faubert was inspired to write Wanda’s War (2023) out of interest in her husband’s family. I wanted to know more about how Wanda came to Canada, via a program which took her from a displaced persons’ camp in Germany after WWII to working in a textile mill in small-town Quebec. There she was expected to work for two years, for relatively low wages and living in company housing administered by nuns, to repay the cost of her airfare to this country.

Mavis Gallant, when she was working as a reporter in Montreal, wrote a feature about this, travelling to Saint-Georges to speak to the women about their experiences, to determine whether the mill owner took advantage of the women’s desperation or whether this was a valuable program which offered desirable opportunities.

She talked finances and shared food with them (nothing a Canadian housewife would serve, she declared) and got down to the dollars-and-cents of it all and how that experience would have affected Wanda’s closed-mouth policy about her past, her reluctance to speak of difficult times in her history, with her son.

This explains my initial interest, but more than half the book is about difficulties Wanda experienced as Europe fell under increasingly fascist control in the years leading up to the war, in advance of Germany’s invasion of Poland in September 1939. So readers can more fully understand the changes and historical conflicts, Faubert explains and explores Polish history.

This requires some explanation of Russian/Soviet history, as well as events in Belarus and Ukraine which wasn’t necessarily compelling in relationship to Wanda’s story (which is actually mostly speculation) but as a backdrop to current events, it certainly is. That was unexpectedly interesting.

Khadija Abdalla Bajaber’s The House of Rust (2021) won the inaugural Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction. (It also won the Graywolf Prize for African Fiction.) I reread it in anticipation of the 2024 shortlist announcement for this year’s UKLG prize, and Bill also read it; last year, we read some books from the 2023 list together (Bill posted about Brother Alive, Arboreality, and Ten Planets).

When I read The House of Rust in 2021, I burst through it in nearly a single sitting: partly because the library duedate had crept up quickly but partly because Aisha’s story is immediately and consistently gripping. The concept of her as heroine immediately appeals, unassuming and humble but stalwart and quietly fierce.

“She was no great beauty, nor exceptionally religious, nor as intelligent as the sort of woman who end up running businesses or becoming great matriarchs. She was an isolated careful fiction of a girl. Doing what she was told, yet keeping the rest of her to herself.”

This time, I vowed to take more notes but a quarter of the way into the story, I had to force myself to stop, and reread again, to do just that. The story is so propulsive that I seemed to tumble from one page to the next, attentive but not analytical, responsive but not responsible.

“Once they’d disappeared, her head dropped forward—the ocean cleared, the surface had returned like a lid over a boiling pot, but she knew what lay ever simmering, murmuring underneath, and it was not trapped, only veiled.”

The only disruptions in my rereading were in response to scenes that I felt were wholly fresh, nearly overwhelming. Because yes, things do happen in this story, even if the most profound shifts are in thoughts and relationships.

There was no saving the spine of Casey Plett’s On Community (published by Biblioasis in 2023). Before I’d reached the halfway point, it was beginning to slope, and I’d left it face-down too many times. (A credit to the series, even in ARC form, there are no permanent splits in the binding.)

“No” to pat answers, “yes” to nuance: ultimately she doesn’t even define ‘community’, but somehow you’re left feeling like this slim volume is richly satisfying.

Also, I absolutely loved her 2014 collection of short stories A Safe Girl to Love. (It has, since, been reissued by Arsenal Pulp Press, pictured alongisde.) As well as her 2021 collection A Dream of a Woman.

If you have a niggle every time that you type or utter the word ‘community’ you will probably appreciate this book as much as I do. And, if you don’t, this book is for you too.

Collections of essays, sassy erasure poems, translated literature, history/memoir, a fantastical tale, and musings on culture and ways of being in the world: there’s something for every reading mood here. Most of these books are still lounging, but perhaps sharing something about them will help them find their way to more permanent accommodations.

What’s your reading mood like right now, and which of these would best capture your inclinations in this moment?