This year I am trying to read more deliberately whimsically. Go ahead and giggle, I know it’s ridiculous. Over the course of a reading lifetime, I’ve allowed some reading habits that I enjoyed to fall away, like reading with the seasons in mind. Like resolving to read something
On the second-last page of A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders explains that writing the book turned out to be a chance to ask himself “again” and “at length” this question: “Do you still want to devote your life to fiction?” Spoiler: he does.
When I think about novellas I’ve enjoyed this year, I recall Poulomi Sanyal’s Colour Me Confounded (2017) and Kerry Trautman’s Irregulars (2023), their settings soaked with the ambiance of their main characters’ workplaces, whether a boardroom or a diner. And I think about Helen deWitt’s The English Understand Wool
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
Sometimes I add a very specific book to my TBR list, complete with ISBN and the source of the recommendation or the reason for my curiosity. Sometimes there’s a name added to the list, with no context or details. That’s how it was with Dunya Mikhail, so I started
