2024 books!

I read 52 books in 2025, just barely making my goal. This is what my reading pattern looked like this year (chart from The Storygraph, my recommended book-tracking site):

nothing 3 months into each school term – March and October. (Though it may not have been actually nothing – I only track the day I finish a book, not the day I start it, and I tend to read several books at once, so sometimes several end up being “read” on the same day.)

Here is my habitual annual list of “most memorable books of the year,” which just means that they are the books I find myself thinking about and/or recommending the most often! These are derived from the books I read this year, not from books that came out this year—in most cases, I’m a little behind the times. I actually had more than 10 on my first list, so I have a little honourable mention section at the end just to keep the list manageable!

Nonfiction

Andrew McConnell Stott, The Poet and the Vampyre: The Curse of Byron and the Birth of Literature’s Greatest Monsters

I mean, I love reading books about the late Romantics – Byron, Shelley, and the whole gang, and I usually find them pretty memorable regardless of the writing quality. The angle this one took: focusing on the secondary characters from the whole Lake Geneva business—John Polidori and Clare Claremont. The former was a very, very unlucky man. The latter was a real survivor (and drama queen).

Ann Boyer, The Undying: Pain, Vulnerability, Mortality, Medicine, Art, Time, Dreams, Exhaustion, Cancer, and Care

This book, about Boyer’s cancer experience, is harrowing and poetic, focusing less on the cancer itself and all the confrontation with mortality that brings than on her treatment by the medical systems and by other people.

John Vaillant, Fire Weather: The Making of Beast

I hope that’s the right subtitle - I don’t have a copy of the book and online I’ve found three different subtitles for it on different editions so far! This was the first book I read last year, so it might not be a fair fight, but it’s definitely the book I’ve recommended the most in many different contexts – for the content as well as for the quality of reporting. In short: it uses the Fort McMurray fire as a jumping-off point to investigate how the increasing prevalence of wildfires is related to climate change and fossil fuel extraction.

Stanley Munn and Patricia Cucman, To See What He Saw: J.E.H. MacDonald and the O’Hara Years, 1924–1932.

I only recently got my hands on the book, but I first encountered Munn and Cucman’s project in a exhibition at the Whyte Museum in Banff. Even if you don’t go in for the Group of Seven much, I think this one is well worth examining. The project, completed over decades, was to photograph the specific scenes painted by MacDonald in the Rockies. The writing is dense art-history stuff, but the images keep you anchored. It’s sure a tome, though.

Poetry

Michael Ondaatje, A Year of Last Things

Oh, Michael Ondaatje. The first academic conference I ever gave a paper at was a Michael Ondaatje conference in Paris. My paper was about the mythology around him and his life, and the way it was carefully maintained in his semi-autobiographical works. Much has been written about this book elsewhere, so I won’t say much about the content except to point out how would make a good new chapter for my nearly 30-year-old paper. This book also made me remember, yes, there was always something deeply weird about how women are portrayed in Ondaatje’s works—uncomfortably reverent and also icky (reminiscent of Leonard Cohen), but was hard to call out in the 90s. This book is especially worth reading for long-time Ondaatje enthusiasts, and I suspect that is who it is for, and if that's you, you've probably already read it; this book would lose a lot for a reader who hasn't read and thought about his classic works.

Chimwemwe Undi, Scientific Marvel

Chim’s book won the GG, but I’m here mostly for the Winnipeg content – something she makes a point to start with when doing hometown readings. Her first book has been long-awaited by the Winnipeg writing community, and I’ve been recommending it to everyone with even a passing interest in poetry.

Fiction

Paul Lynch, Prophet Song

I was a bit late to the party on this one that one the Booker Prize in 2023. If you haven’t already heard, it’s about a the rise and increasing violence and repression of an authoritarian government in the Republic of Ireland. It’s the kind of dystopian fiction that feels very real and not sci-fi-ish at all, but immediately alarming. But I have to say at the end, after digesting it all, I am stuck with the horrible feeling of oh no, is this what it takes--a book about western Europeans--to make a book about war and refugees really hit home for me? I mean, I also read an actual refugee memoir this year (Danny Ramadan's great book Crooked Teeth, on my honourable mention list below), but this book about made-up Irish refugees blew a bigger hole in my consciousness.

Sean Michaels, Do You Remember Being Born?

Michaels must have been working on this AI book before ChatGPT hit the bigtime. In the notes he writes about how he trained an AI on Marianne Moore. And that’s who the novel is about more or less – a contemporary version of Marianne Moore who gets hired by an unnamed Big Tech Company to collaborate with an AI in what for the company is a publicity stunt, but for her (and for the AI?) is an existential crisis. The novel features italicized phrases (and, later in the book, whole passages) written by AI. If writers are going to use AI, this is the way to do it--transparently, and questioningly.

Drama

Cliff Cardinal, As You Like It: A Radical Retelling

Okay, this was the only play I read this year, though I saw plenty. I regretted reading it in the end because AFTER I read it, I unexpectedly had the opportunity to see Cardinal perform the piece. If you know the play, you’ll know that it’s better as a no spoilers situation. If you don’t know the play and think you might have the opportunity to see it someday, maybe don’t read it and don’t look it up. I mean, it was still a fantastic performance even knowing the content. But it would have hit differently without having read it. (I can tell you it is certainly a lot funnier when performed.) I had the chance to chat with Cardinal after the performance and he said it was the most, er, rambunctious audience it had ever had. Go see it if you ever get the chance!

Honourable mention books I almost wrote about -- just so this post doesn’t get too long!

Angeline Schellenberg, Mondegreen Riffs
Vi Khi Nao and Sarah Burgoyne, Mechanophilia, Book 1
Kazim Ali, Indian Winter
Emily Urquhart, The Age of Creativity
Danny Ramadan, Crooked Teeth