If you’re a regular reader, you might recall that my reason for participating in the Toronto Public Library Reading Challenge was my failure to complete it in years past (more about that here and here), but throughout last year I worked towards this goal.

I’ve talked about most of the books here already—save for three—and one of them was a real favourite: Mia McKenzie’s Skye Falling (2021). Nothing really happens, but every character’s life at the end of the book has profoundly changed from the beginning. Skye’s voice captures the balance perfectly, for me, between flawed and funny; this is the kind of book I wanted when I picked up Eleanor Oliphant, and I super wanted everyone in this story to be completely fine.

“I lean back in my chair and rub my eyes. I think about the ways good and not-so-good times fold together and overlap, the ways a memory of stress and one of reparation can sleep like lovers in the same bed, touching fingertips in the quiet, and I question myself. Why do I pretend it was all bad?”

As a sequel, Satoshi Yagisawa’s More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop (2011; 2024 Eric Ozawa) sustains the first book’s tone. People spend a lot of time in their own minds, drinking coffee and wondering how other people are feeling and thinking (only occasionally actually asking). And there are often books around. The central plot element might not have the same resonance for readers who haven’t read the previous book, but in the end this isn’t a book you’re going to read for plot. You’ll read it because you like the cover, or because you’ve picked up the habit of these seemingly-cosy Japanese books about cats and hot drinks and solitude (there aren’t actually any cats in this one) and you don’t mind the undercurrent of grief and impermanence simmering inside.

“People forget all kinds of things. They live by forgetting. Yet our thoughts endure, the way waves leave traces in the sand.”

And Shokoofeh Azar’s The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree (2017; Trans. 2020, Translator’s Name Withheld) which I know Sue and Bron both really enjoyed and admired so, when I saw it on the Library Sale table, all the way on the other side of the world, I snapped it up. A delicate interweaving of family stories and Persian tales, here reality and imagination dance so fluidly that one struggles to find the borders. When the story began, I thought it would be the sort of book that takes some time to absorb, because this Iranian novel is filled with loss and heartache, but there is something about the way that she captures these experiences and transforms them, deftly but determinedly, which makes it almost unputdownable. There are so many stories within this story, that as soon as I was finished, I was struck by the conundrum of wanting to immediately share this copy with a reading friend but, simultaneously, not feeling prepared to let it go yet either, because I feel as though I would notice completely different aspects of the story on a reread. Really wonderful.

“It’s life’s failure and its deficiencies that make someone a daydreamer. I don’t understand why prophets and philosophers didn’t see the significance in that. I think imagination is at the heart of reality, or at least, is the immediate definition and interpretation of reality.”

BASIC CHALLENGE
A Book Published in 2024: Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr! (2024)
A Lambda Literary Award Winner: Mia McKenzie’s Skye Falling (2021)*
A Book by an Author with a Chronic Illness: Samantha Irby’s we are never meeting in real life (2017)
A Non-Fiction Book by an Indigenous Author: Angela Sterritt’s Unbroken (2023)
A Book by a Caribbean Author: Charmaine Wilkerson’s Black Cake (2022)
A Book about Growing up in a Religious Household: Kelli Jo Ford’s Crooked Hallelujah (2020)
A Memoir by a Canadian Author: Anais Granofsky’s The Girl in the Middle (2022)
A Book about an Historical Female Figure: Phong Nguyen’s Bronze Drum (2020)

A Book about an Invention: William Kamkwamba’s The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (2009)
A Book Set in a Library or Bookstore: Satoshi Yagisawa’s More Days at the Morisaki Bookshop (2011; 2024 Eric Ozawa)*
A Book about Community: Délana R. A. Dameron’s Redwood Court (2024)

A Book about a Holiday: Uzma Jalaluddin and Marissa Stapley’s Three Holidays and a Wedding (2023)

ADVANCED CHALLENGE
A Book Set in the Canadian Territories: David Robertson’s The Barren Grounds (2020)

A Book Recommended by Your Library: Jessica George’s Maame (2023) Recommendation here.

A Book with Dark Humour: R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface (2023)
A Book You Discovered through an Unexpected Source: Shokoofeh Azar’s The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree (2017; 2020)*
A Book about Playing Games: Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow (2022)
A Book Recommended by Someone Younger than You: Mimi Grace’s Make a Scene (2020) from Rachel
A Book with a Long Title: Quan Barry’s When I’m Gone, Look for Me in the East (2022)

A Book about Politics: Sevgi Soysal’s Dawn (Translated by Maureen Freely)

A Book from an Animal’s Perspective: Sōseki Natsume’s I Am a Cat (Illustrated by Chiroru Kobato and Translated by Zack Davisson (1905-6; 2010)
A Thriller or True Crime: Stacey Abrams While Justice Sleeps(2021)

A Book that Takes Place in a School: Mariko Tamaki’s I Am Not Starfire (2021)

A BIPOC Romance: Kevin Kwan’s Lies and Weddings (2024)

A Canadian Immigrant Story: Mai Nguyen’s Sunshine Nails (2023)

A Book Referencing a Work of Art: Kent Monkman and Gisèle Gordon’s Volume One of The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testikle (2023)

Which of these categories do you think would have been the simplest to fulfill from your stacks, and which the most challenging?

Which one(s) do you think you might adopt for your 2025 even if you aren’t officially reading for challenges?

Are there goals—reading or life—that you’ve abandoned or failed in the past, that you would like to “begin again” and achieve? It doesn’t have to be a new year, to choose to begin again.