Books I Read in 2021, Part 2

Books I Read in 2021, Part 2

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Okay, yes, I have read this book umpteen times, starting when I was about 13 or 14, I think, when I stayed up all night to finish it. I even wrote a substantial poem about it in my second book, where I imagined Jane in conversation with Anne of Green Gables (a book I’ve read even more than umpteen times), so suffice it to say I’ve thought about Jane Eyre a lot.

This time I read it aloud to my daughter, and so many new things struck me, things that I’m certainly not the first person to notice, but just came into relief for me this time around. How much of a romance novel it is, first of all. How FUCKING MUCH Rochester talks. My daughter kept commenting on this. Like, shut up already, dude. We kind of really wanted Helen Burns to shut up, too. And then she dies, so. How complex some of these characters are: Jane, of course, but also St. John Rivers, a terrible but fascinating person.

We mainly thought Jane really needed to get out more and meet more men before she makes rash decisions. And how a lot of problems would have been solved by modern divorce laws.

Reading any such classic book to children also necessitates glossing the rampant colonialism, and the religiosity, too (something we also had to talk about in Dracula).

Women Talking by Miriam Toews

Another party I’m late too, but I wanted to make sure I’d read it since there is a film in the works I’ll no doubt want to see. My favourite thing about this book was the narrator and the perspective he brings to the events of the story. So little “happens” in the book (as you might guess from the title), and yet by the end, it’s like the world has changed-without-changing — not even so much for the women (though it has for them, too), but for the narrator. I’m so interested in how this profound transformation will get translated in the film.

I Got the Dog: A Memoir of Rising by Amanda Boyden

This is on here not so much for the story of Boyden’s life, but for the oblique little window into the lives of literary celebrities. Yes, the book had many fine qualities and Boyden's work stands on its own blah blah blah. But this list is for personal memorability, and those who know me know I have things to say about Joseph Boyden, which I will not say here, and this is Amanda Boyden’s post-relationship memoir.

There’s not much gossip in it, really, but the little throwaways keep you asking questions. Wait, does the literary in-crowd in Canada really go on vacation trips with leading literary journalists? Wait, that’s Gord Downie she is talking about like she was in love with him? It took me a minute to realize who she meant.

These Canadian celebrity moments pass with so little comment I’m torn between whether it’s done to seem nonchalant or done because a U.S. audience wouldn’t see them as important. And this was not published in Canada; in fact, you can’t even find it in the Chindigo database—it’s like the book doesn’t exist. (I did not detect any references to Indigo executives in the memoir.) This nonexistence was exactly how I came to read the book--as soon as I heard among writers that you couldn’t get it at Chindigo, I immediately ordered it at an independent.

NISHGA by Jordan Abel

Of the many poetry books I read this year, NISHGA was my most memorable. A deeply personal conceptual work about intergenerational trauma, and centring the Indigenous reader, NISHGA uses, among other things, essay-like transcripts, visual poetry, and original documents to create a work of gripping emotional intensity, outstanding intellectual rigour, and hard-won truth. Even though (admission) I find some conceptual poetry a bit of a slog, NISHGA was unputdownable for me.

One more post to come that will include my MOST memorable book of the year!