January 19, 2026
Dangerous Memory: Coming of Age in the Decade of Greed, by Charlie Angus
That the 1980s never really ended, as Charlie Angus argues in his memoir Dangerous Memory: Coming of Age in the Decade of Greed, has been remarkably clear than in the last couple of weeks with unrest in Iran, American interference in Central America, ongoing turmoil in Afghanistan, and dangerous bluster and violence on the part of the not-so-super superpowers, America and Russia. And the 1980s were where the race to the bottom began, with governments in the US, UK, and Canada selling off public resources, corporate raiders dismantling profitable companies, and good jobs being shipped overseas to where wages were much lower, the labour movement left much reduced in power and workers paid the price.
But that wasn’t all, Angus notes, his notes sociological study blended with personal biography as he shares his own experiences in a punk band and as an activist during that tumultuous decade (as well as his later experiences as a Canadian Member of Parliament). The “decade of greed” was also a powerful era of people power, where social movements led to incredible change that no one would have seen coming at the beginning of the decade—the fall of the Soviet Union, great strides to protect the environment, movement toward nuclear disarmament. These are what Angus (borrowing the phrase from theology professor Candace McLean) calls “dangerous memories,” dangerous to those in power for how they are also the seeds of hope and resistance.
Like John Ganz’s acclaimed When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, Angus’s Dangerous Memory connects the dots and fills in the blanks as to how we got from there to here—the 1990s, he writes, was when “we pissed it all away. Angus addresses international politics, the attack on labour, the drug crisis, homelessness, the AIDs epidemic, and so much more, using the recent past to make of the chaos of the present, and to offer a path forward toward into a different and better kind of story.
January 14, 2026
The Tenant, by M. Berry
In The Tenant, by M. Barry (a pseudonym for the writer Michelle Berry), bestselling thriller writer Amy Ellis has been unable to write anything since birth of her daughter, but hopes that her family’s year-long sojourn to Freiburg, Germany, delivers a solution to this—her husband has a contract at a non-profit there, their daughter will be enrolled in daycare, her husband’s company has secured the family with a lovely rental house. Except that the house comes with unexpected feature, a tenant, a slightly odd English woman called who’s living in the attic flat. A double booking, maybe? Eleanor is a bit vague about it, and nobody seems able to contact the landlord, and so Amy and her husband decide to just live with it. Eleanor seems harmless enough, and she begins to help out with Amy’s daughter, delivering her to and from her preschool, leaving Amy’s days free to finally write her book—a novel inspired by a series of mysterious killings that are dominating news headlines.
But the reader, of course, is privy to Eleanor’s point of view, and soon learns that the tenant is not so harmless after all. And that her presence is Amy’s rental house is part of a carefully laid out plan that Amy has no idea she is walking straight into, and that the thriller that she’s writing is actually her real life, a story with shades of Misery or The Shining.
I tore through this book in a day, and got more and more gripped as the tension ramped up. And while I can’t say that the plot was watertight—there were some holes; it was baggy in places—this was still a satisfying, riveting, and most enjoyable read.
January 14, 2026
Black Cherokee, by Antonio Michael Downing
“If casting out our Ophelias wounds us, we can only become whole by restoring them. By making room for the possibility of transcendence. Of being both. Of being beyond both.” —Antonio Michael Downing
Okay, buckle up, because Antonio Michael Downing’s Black Cherokee is a novel with a voice, a voice that conveys the story of Ophelia Blue Rivers with the swiftness and drive of the very river that runs through the town of Etsi, skirting the property belonging to Ophelia’s grandmother, Grandma Blue, who has the same name as Ophelia, the same name as the first Black baby in Etsi generations ago (but not so many generations ago). Etsi—which means “mother” in Cherokee language—is a fictional community in South Carolina, home to Black and Cherokee communities that live together, but also apart, Grandma Blue and her late husband Chief Trouthands becoming the exception to that rule when they fell in love. But after Chief Trouthands dies, the rest of the community—against Grandma Blue’s advice—is persuaded to disband, their land sold to rich white men of industry, and now the river is polluted. The story following Ophelia Blue—who is neither Black nor Cherokee, but instead half of each and “all mixed up”—from her early childhood in Etsi, to the Black church evangelical community from which she tries to find belonging, to her experiences as a student enrolled in a special program for bright Black students at an otherwise all-white high school, and finally to her life on the cusp of adulthood and autonomy as she is finally forced to take a step on her own journey, instead of one that seems set out for her on the basis of who she is or isn’t or who her family was.
Sweeping, funny, poignant, and honest, full of music and magic and butterflies, Downing’s narrative shimmers, sings, and shines, transcends and delights. A beautiful feat of imagination and possibility, I really loved this book.
January 13, 2026
The Folded Leaf, by William Maxwell
I LOVE William Maxwell, love, love, LOVE William Maxwell, whose novels are the most curious blend of realism and modernism, and who writes about men, love, and longing so very tenderly. For the last few years, I’ve read one of his novels over the winter break, but I think I’ve read his better known books and so my local secondhand bookstores were turning up nothing, and finally I couldn’t take the void and ordered a copy of his 1945 novel The Folded Leaf, a story of male friendship set in the 1920s. (What set me over the edge was the email I received from my friend Julia reading, “OMG KERRY I don’t think you impressed upon me just how brilliant and devastating THEY CAME LIKE SWALLOWS really is. oh how i loved that novel.” [I actually think that receiving such novels is the meaning of life.])
And I liked it so very much. And while I was reading it, I was THRILLED to see a Substack Note from author Brandon Taylor who was reading The Cheateau, which was my first William Maxwell book, and Taylor writes, “This novel is warm, funny, but also probing and wise and profound about surfaces, about illusions, by the yearning for meaning, about the strangeness of travel, about the mystery of human relationships. It is social, historical, but also timeless. I just loved it. LOVED IT. SO MUCH. I CANNOT STOP THINKING ABOUT IT. AMAZING BOOK.” (William Maxwell. He makes us emphatic. We can’t help it.)
He also remarks on Maxwell’s 1980 novel So Long, See You Tomorrow being way overhyped, which was interesting because it was the one novel of his that did not move me at all, but I had assumed that the problem was mine. Maxwell’s work can be a little bit difficult, usually where difficulty might not be expected, a bit strange, uncanny, and tricky to decipher in places—there were threads in The Folded Leaf I had a hard time following. I had assumed I wasn’t reading well with So Long…, but maybe it’s just not his best work. Which is fine, because his best work is so good.
The Folded Leaf is the story of two high school boys who are both misfits in their own way, and who end up being best friends, but neither of them are ever able to articulate just what their connection means to them, or what its parameters are, which means things end up being very messy and complicated as they move through the years, going off to university together, Lymie making all the grades, Spud becoming a boxing star, much to his mother’s chagrin. Where does one boy end and the other begin? The novel’s climax is brutal and devastating.
January 13, 2026
DEFINITELY THRIVING in PEOPLE
This cool news today! Read it here.
And reviews are coming in:
“…a bravado blend of Barbara Pym and Bridget Jones.” —Library Journal
January 12, 2026
Days of Feasting and Rejoicing, by David Bergen
“It was too dangerous, and fantasy so easily descended into violence and delirium. To act, or not act. Was it that simple? What consequences would she suffer? She looked down at the hands in her lap. Oh, Esther. What will you do?”
Lines are blurred in David Bergen’s novel Days of Feasting and Rejoicing, between truth and fantasy, right and wrong, between a person and another. The novel begins in Bali where two young white women who live in Thailand are travelling, and then one of them ends up dead. The other woman, Esther Maile, flies back to Thailand on the dead woman’s passport, and continues to behave curiously, although the narrative is so firmly fixed in her twisted mind that it’s hard to see what’s really happening. Eventually Police Inspector Net Wantok’s point of view enters the story, and we see him struggling to put together the pieces of the puzzle, which become extra puzzling after the dead girl’s brother flies to Thailand to find out what happened to his sister, and he disappears. Dark, unsettling, and impeccably executed, I was totally riveted by this story, which was so deliciously disturbing.
January 7, 2026
BOOKSPO is Back!
Season 4 of Bookspo is HERE, and it’s better than ever. Listen to my conversation with Kate Cayley about her beautiful and propulsive novel PROPERTY here, or wherever you get your podcasts.
January 7, 2026
Important Household Update
I’d be remiss to not post about our new couch, just because each of our previous couches arrived with official announcements. The first one in 2007, which was monumental for having replaced our futon, which (unbelievably) suggests that we spent two years with only a futon for seating in our apartment when we first moved to Toronto—it’s so strange to consider the things that pass for normal when one is broke and 25. (The futon was purchased back when there were two futon stores on a single block of Bloor Street east of Bathurst, and would go on to become our daughter’s big girl bed when she finally moved out of a crib.)
By 2007, we were both gainfully employed, and so we bought the couch, although I can’t fathom now why we selected that one. Were our parameters HUGE, HIDEOUS, and BROWN, and this was the one that checked all the boxes? I can definitely say that it was comfortable though, the comfiest couch that ever couched, and we got it before toxic scotch-guarding was made illegal so it was able to rise to the challenge of our very leaky small children, and then once those children were old enough to leak less, we replaced it with a more stylish option.
Because it was 2018, it was a very internet couch, and even came with its own hashtag, and like all things on the internet, it would fail to live up to our expectations. The fabric got kind of gnarly, it was not that comfortable, and then one, day early last month, I discovered that the spring had poked through the bottom of the frame, and we were honestly relieved, glad to see it go, our internet couch. (To the couch’s credit, while the children no longer leak, they are bigger, and they are lounging on that couch perpetually. That couch never caught a break. There are couches that live in rooms where nobody ever sits, but we only have one room, and people are sitting all the time. It’s a hard knock life.)
And so now there is a new couch, one without a hashtag, purchased from a wholesale place in Burlington, and it’s just a little bit longer than its predecessor, which is good, because we watch movies in our family sitting four in a row, which has become a tighter squeeze as time has passed, and we welcome the addition of some wiggle room. But other than that, the acquisition of this couch has been mostly non-monumental, which perhaps is monumental in itself—I’ve stopped measuring life in chesterfields. Now in our mid/late forties, we’ve arrived at a moment where such a thing as a new couch is almost ordinary.
January 5, 2026
What I Read on my Winter Vacation
Holiday break! This year I only read books by British lady writers whose pub dates span most of the 20th century. It was a pleasure!
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, by Muriel Spark: I’ve been reading a lot of Muriel Spark in the last while, and welcomed the opportunity to finally reread The Prime…, which I initially encountered in a first year university English class, and almost all of it went over my head. Muriel Spark’s work is strange, sly, and sneaky, and this slim volume is especially subtle. In all her work, there is also a religious element I don’t fully understand, so I’m always a bit unmoored when I’m reading her, but this time I was grateful to easily have a better understanding of the book. While it’s very much about girlhood, the novel’s scope is very broad and I think I personally had to be older to really understand it. It’s also funny, and brutally devastating in a vicious yet understated way that is easy to gloss over if one is not paying attention—I really wasn’t back then, or just didn’t have the right kind of antennae.
Offshore, by Penelope Fitzgerald: I have a complicated relationship with P. Fitzgerald, whose novels were off-putting upon my first encounters, and in some ways they continue to be so—I don’t read her as easily as I do other English writers. Her perspectives and framings are always just a little “off” from what I’m expecting, and there is a strangeness too that’s a little akin to Spark. But so many people I admire love her AND her books are short enough that they’re easy to reconsider, and so I’ve done so, and read them all, connecting with her through this challenge. I also connected via her wonderful biography, by Hermione Lee, which I loved—her own story is fascinating. Anyway, in December I read the novel Fonseca, by Jessica Francis Kane, a fictional telling of an experience Fitzgerald had in Mexico in 1952, and while I liked it, but didn’t love it (it was strange and a bit obscure in the same way I find Fitzgerald’s work, probably deliberately so), it did put me in the mood to reread some of her work, so I picked Offshore, set in the 1960s, about a motley crew of variously desperate people living on London canal boats—something Fitzgerald knew about, as she’d spent time raising her own children on a canal boat during some of many lean years, a situation which finally ended when the boat sunk and landed at the bottom of the Thames.
The Rector’s Wife, by Joanna Trollope: It was at this point that the themes of my winter reading became clearer—I was going to be reading about rectors, vicars, and curates well into the new year (and Bishops too!). Even Offshore had an interfering Priest, although he didn’t have a lot of impact. Also Joanna Trollope had died earlier in December, and so it was time to finally read this novel which I stole from a rental cottage the summer before last, drawn by its Pym appeal. It was very fun and rich, the story of a middle-aged woman who has delayed her own chances and dreams in order to serve her husband’s interest as a rector in a rural English community. But when he fails to get the promotion he’d been hoping for, she finally takes matters into her own hands, getting a job stocking shelves in a grocery store in order to finance their troubled youngest child’s private schooling—although it’s also more than that, setting off a cascade of events that change everything.
A Game of Hide and Seek, by Elizabeth Taylor: I don’t really have a sense of Elizabeth Taylor (the other one, who did not have violet eyes), but every time I read her, I’m surprised by her talent, and glad that I did. This one is about Harriet, the unremarkable daughter of a suffragette whose quiet life is disturbed when she falls in love with Vesey, the nephew of her mother’s friend, the flame he lights in her heart enduring even after the two are parted (they were barely together) and she finds respectability in marriage to an older man. Which means that when Vesey reappears in her life decades later, she can’t help but act on her feelings and the attraction between them, even at the risk of upsetting everything in her careful life. There’s a lot of humour in this one too (the shop where Harriet works where wages are so low that the employees feel justified spending their workdays taking care of personal needs, like doing their ironing, or waxing their upper lips). Richly textured, and full of such understated feeling, I enjoyed this one a lot.
A Few Green Leaves, by Barbara Pym: The Barbara Pym read odyssey continues, and I loved this one, her final novel, released posthumously. Pym’s novels are either set in London, or in rural villages, this one being the latter, in which a 30-something anthropologist moves into a cottage and becomes swept up in community affairs, and possibly an attraction to the widowed rector who is much occupied by local history. It’s very much about the passage of time, and there are mentions of characters from Pym’s previous novels—the formidable Esther Clovis, in particular—having died. I think this would be a weird, albeit still enjoyable, novel to pick up and start reading out of the blue, but in the context of Pym’s oeuvre, it’s very poignant and lovely.
The Little Girls, by Elizabeth Bowen: Bowen is another writer I sometimes struggle with. I’ve really enjoyed some of her novels, but found others really hard-going, almost as though they were a deliberate running of circles around their points. This one was also a little bit hard to understand, and very odd—it was her second-last novel and perhaps not wholly representative of her body of work. It was fiercely funny in places—an eccentric widow places ads in all national newspapers in order to locate two old friends with whom she’d partaken in a pact during their school days just before WW1, but also there are parts where I’m still not sure what actually happened, the story so thoroughly obfuscated, a little too much going on. It was not my favourite
The Knox Brothers, by Penelope Fitzgerald: The one book in this stack that’s not a novel, but it’s by a novelist, so it counts? I happened upon this secondhand copy of Fitzgerald’s biography of her father and uncles, and wasn’t quite sure how much I’d be interested in these men’s stories, but it turned out to be A LOT. The Knox brothers were the sons of the Bishop of Manchester and the daughter of the Bishop of Lahore, four out of six children, and were remarkable every one. The one who grew to be Penelope Fitzgerald’s father became the editor of Punch Magazine, another was a famous cryptologist in both world wars, the other two both were priests, one of whom ended up converting to Catholicism (and FINALLY this book gave me the context for the Anglo-Catholic questions that come up again and again in Barbara Pym novels where priests are continually “going over to Rome” or being suspected as such). Even more remarkable than their accomplishments and eccentricities, Fitzgerald underlines how her father and his brothers were kind and loving men, feeling people in a time where men of their class were not commonly thought to have such emotional capacity. I loved this one.
Family and Friends, by Anita Brookner: And I loved this one too, though I was wary. Some of Brookner’s novels are incredible dense, opaque, and more cerebral than anything else, but this one (which followed her Booker-winning Hotel Du Lac in 1984) seems to be the exception to the rule. Not cerebral in the slightest, it begins with a family photograph and glosses across the surface of that family’s history across decades as things are ever-changing and nothing ever quite unfolding as expected. Fast, sweeping, and engaging, this turns into a remarkable portrait of seemingly ordinary people, highlighting the less flattering aspects of its characters. Playful and surprising, this one as a pleasure.
Whose Body, by Dorothy L. Sayers: I wasn’t planning on reading Sayers, except then I watched Wake Up, Dead Man, the new “Knives Out” movie, and this novel is referenced (and also Penelope Fitzgerald’s priest uncle Ronnie Knox was also a detective novelist and contemporary of Sayers—they were both members of The Detection Club, along with Agatha Christie, and others). I came to Sayers and Peter Wimsey via Harriet Vane, and was sort of uninterested in reading any of Sayers books in which Vane doesn’t feature (which was most of them) but getting to know Wimsey and his vulnerabilities (he’s suffering from shell shock in the early ’20s; his mother admits it might be too much to ask someone to get over a war in just a year or two) was fascinating. The mystery was satisfying and not too convoluted, although the antisemitism was unpalatable, though at least it was mostly displayed by the novels villains, but still.
The Life of Violet, by Virginia Woolf: This little book is a collection of three short stories written by Woolf when she was still Virginia Stephen, back in 1908. This work had previously been regarded as unimportant, but then a polished draft was discovered, resulting in this publication of these three fables inspired by the life of Woolf’s friend Violet Dickinson. Dreamy, funny, and whimsical, the stories are also remarkable for how they feature elements that would continue to preoccupy Woolf’s creative work—biography, rooms of one’s own, the lives of women—for the rest of her career.
An Unsuitable Attachment, by Barbara Pym: My Pym reread is nearly complete! This was an earlier Pym novel that remained unpublished until after her death, and lacks the (even unplumbed) depth of her later work, but is still very charming, and it was kind of amazing to read back into the past in order to see Esther Clovis resurrected!! This is one of Pym’s urban London parish books, complete with a sojourn to Rome. There is a librarian, a pampered cat, a lugubrious vicar’s wife, chicken in aspic, an anthropologist, and a bedraggled beatnik—what more could a reader want?
Pack of Cards, by Penelope Lively: And I am so THRILLED to be loving this book as much I am, because it’s a pretty big commitment—more than 30 stories by Penelope Lively published in one volume in North America after her Booker win for Moon Tiger in 1987. (It includes the contents of her first two story collections and nine new stories). Fortunately, the stories are wonderful, and I’m gobbling them up—I’m nearly two thirds through now. I don’t think I’ve ever read her short fiction before, but it’s just reminded of what a wonderful writer she is, and now I want to reread the huge stack of her novels that I own, most of which I’ve not read in years.
January 2, 2026
Welcome, 2026
I have resisted the urge for old year reflections over the last few days, and not because the old year is one that I would rather forget. On the contrary, I’ve had a really nice year in 2025, but perhaps what was nicest about it was how much I’d learned how to be present in the moment, instead of flinging myself into the unknown future that hasn’t arrived yet or desperately trying to hold onto the past. Or instead of trying to quantify my worth via lists of accomplishments, successes, experiences, etc. I am ever-learning that my own self-worth has nothing to do with any of that, and also that time is a river and life is easiest when I let it flow, instead of trying to hold it all. I’m facing forward instead of looking back, and welcoming whatever comes with curiosity, gratitude, humility, and wonder. Three-cheers for not being an anxiety-fuelled lunatic, could NOT recommend enough.
*Our one concession to old year reflections was once again partaking in my favourite New Year ritual, which is getting 2025 photos printed and working together to order them into an album. It really is the nicest thing.
