November 26, 2025

Keep that Candle Burning Bright

I’d heard legends about such practices, but until this summer I’d never witnessed it myself, the meticulously maintained collections of used books up for grabs at rural waste transfer stations. When we arrived at the dump in late August at the end of cottage holiday, it just rained in Haliburton, mercifully, for the first time in weeks (there’d been a fire ban on all summer). And the station attendant was carefully unwrapping the book tables from the layers of plastic tarp that had protected them from the deluge and other weather—there were all kinds of books, hundreds of books, absolutely bizarrely and serendipitously (un)catalogued, the most curious collection of thrillers, bestsellers, ancient paperbacks. There was so much good stuff. There was also so much that stuff that probably no one would ever want to read (weird old children’s books that were missing their covers, or a microwave cookbook for cocktail party appetizers made from Triscuits that smelled like a haunted basement).

And along with the good stuff, and the poor unwanted stuff, there was also the odd semi-obscure volume that had been placed at the dump by fate, just so that one day I could find it, the person it had always been meant for so that it could live forevermore on my shelf. There, alongside Ricky Martin’s autobiography (sadly devoid of its dustjacket) and a 20-year-old human resources manual, I found Keep That Candle Burning Bright, by Bronwen Wallace, a posthumous collection of her poetry I hadn’t encountered before, published by Coach House Press in 1991.

As someone who loves Wallace best for her fiction (her story collection People You’d Trust Your Life To is one of my favourite books) this book is a special treat, a collection of prose poems inspired by tue songs of Emmy Lou Harris:

“Well, what/ do you think we’re doing anyway, spinning out here,/ stuck with each other and no more able to get over/ that than we can get over our need for oxygen? Why/ not sing for what we can’t do, instead of all this/ booming and bragging, most of us stuck in the back/ row anyway, squawking, gimped-up. What if some/ tuneless wonder’s all we’ve got to say for ourselves?/ Off-key, our failings held out, at last, to each other./ What else have we got to offer, really? What else do/ we think they’re for?” —from “This is the Closest I Come to a Song”

November 25, 2025

Small Ceremonies, by Kyle Edwards

As I said a couple of months ago, literary prizes are a scam, AND YET. They’re at their best when they inspire me to read a book I might not have picked up otherwise, in the case of Small Ceremonies, by Kyle Edwards, winner of the 2025 Governor General’s Award for Fiction for English language, and not to be confused with another novel called Small Ceremonies, by a Winnipeg author, Carol Shields’ debut, which isn’t even set in Winnipeg. But in Edwards’ novel, the backdrop is essential, the north end in particular, where friends Clinton Whiteway and Tomahawk “Tommy” Shields are making their way through their final year of high school and playing for the Tigers, their school hockey team, famous for never having won a game, and now the league is trying to push the Tigers out, which makes the prospect of winning more enticing than ever.

The boys have been friends since elementary school, but each one has a different and complicated relationship with the city. Clinton comes from a remote First Nation that his family was forced to leave behind years before after catastrophic flooding destroyed the community, while Tommy grew up in the city and has no experience of rez life, both boys feeling like misfits for different reasons. And the novel follows them and other characters over the course of the school year—Tommy’s sister, a university student; Clinton’s brother, who has just gotten out of jail and back into trouble; Tommy’s mother, adrift in Vancouver’s downtown east side; Clinton’s father, who watches his sons from afar; Clarissa, the intrepid student journalist writing who refuses to stop asking questions about the hockey league’s decision; and Pete Mosienko, who runs the arena, who clears the Tigers’ ice with a shovel and is saving up to finally buy himself an actual Zamboni.

Fierce with humour and heart, this is also a novel that is probably going to break yours, but just let it, and you’ll be glad you did.

November 24, 2025

My Reading Year Reflections

With weeks of 2025 still to go, I’ve already hit my goal of reading 200 books, a goal that is somewhat arbitrary, meaningless, and paltry when you actually think about all the books in the world that I’ll never get to read, but still is pretty substantial in the face of all that, although it only means anything because of how much I’ve loved reading these books, how many of these books I truly loved. Books loved are what I measure out my life in, never mind coffee spoons, and while I know focusing on numbers is kind of irritating (“It’s about quality, not quantity,” so spoke that rare school librarian from my past who did not like me, and that criticism lives rent-free in my head, don’t worry!), but being a fast reader is pretty much my only remarkable skill, so can we let me just have that? Do people go around telling Andre De Grasse not to focus on his speed because it’s making all us slow-walkers feel bad? No, they do not.

If you’re curious about how I find the time to read, I shared some of my top tips here! (#1 is “Get Your Blood Checked,” which really did lead to an entire extra hour of reading every day after I learned that my iron count was low and started taking supplements, and was thereafter able to get up in the morning.)

And in addition to the books themselves, here are some things that helped make my reading year remarkable.

• So much nonfiction. Fiction is my usual lane, but with the world being extra weird and hard to understand in 2025, having nonfiction to help me puzzle it all out has been so helpful and even sometimes reassuring. Diving deep into a subject instead of merely scrolling has also been a nice counter to anxiety. Standout titles that have helped me make sense of the world this year include At a Loss for Words, by Carol Off (which just came out in paperback); When the Clock Broke, by John Ganz; In Crisis, On Crisis: Essays in Troubled Times, by James Cairns; How to Survive a Bear Attack, by Claire Cameron; Y2K: How the 2000s Became Everything, by Colette Shade; The Snag, by Tessa McWatt; Encampment, by Maggie Helwig; Storm the Ballot Box: An Inside’s Guide to a Voting Revolution, by Jo-Ann Roberts; Ripper: The Making of Pierre Poilievre, by Mark Bourrie; and Water Borne, by Dan Rubinstein.
• A focus on Canadian small press books. While I’ve always been a fan of Canadian small press books (which is to say books that are published by presses that aren’t Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, or Harpercollins), I’ve never made them my religion. Especially since market forces mean that the big presses are always going to be able to attract the big deal books that everybody is most excited about (whether that attention is warranted or not) and—this is a controversial statement, I realize—not all small press books are necessarily great and/or to my taste. Sometimes the former is because they lack the resources to fully invest in the production process, which undermines the reader experience. Sometimes the latter is because the very job of a small press is to publish the odd and underrated and not to cater to the widest commercial appeal. Sometimes both factors have meant that small press books have not been as much of my reading focus as they should be. But this year, I decided to make my “On Our Radar” column at 49thShelf a round-up of my own reviews of Canadian small press books, and has that ever been rewarding, pushing me to make small press titles a bigger part of my reading life, resulting in an expansive, transporting, and so much more interesting experience.
• The library. I’ve borrowed books from the library this year more than ever. This is especially convenient since I live in a city with one of the largest library systems in the world, putting so many great books at my fingertips. It’s meant I’ve been able to read a lot of hyped books I wasn’t sure about without getting invested—like, say, The Plot and The Sequel, by Jean Hanff Korelitz. Putting books on hold at the library before they’re released means that I’ve ended up getting to read brand new books before anybody else in the library system OR that I’ve had to wait months and months for my hold to finally arrive, and there are advantages to both of these. The library has allowed me read widely and keep things interesting. (Having just three weeks in which to read a high demand book that can’t be renewed also helps me focus and get the book read, whereas it otherwise might linger on my shelf forever…)
• Bookseller recommendations. It might be hard to tell because I’m still in Instagram a lot, but Bookstagram has factored a lot less into my reading experience this year, which has made my reading more diverse and interesting. And a highlight of this has been heading into bookshops and letting bookseller recommendations decide my purchases—and it’s had me ending up with books like The Road to Tender Hearts, So Far Gone, The Correspondent, and more. (See also “The Booksellers’ List,” new from the Canadian Booksellers Association, which is just definitively excellent. These booksellers have got taste!)
• Weird avenues. My reading regrets most years involve not having pursued enough of these. Not this year though, which makes me very happy. This is partly because I dove into this year with a number of reading projects on the goal, including reading everything by Elizabeth Strout in order of publication (DONE! It was THE BEST!), rereading Carol Shields (I’m slowly going about it, have read up to Swann), and reading Margaret Laurence’s Manawaka books (need to reread The Fire Dwellers and I’m DONE!). None of these authors are that weird, I realize, but anything that isn’t the New York Times bestseller list is a little bit weird these days. I’ve also read a few books in translation, have done plenty of rereading, and feel like I’ve been free to take the wheel in terms of reading what I want to read (which is the nicest freedom I know).
• Reading on my own. A big part of my year even beyond reading has been relearning that not everything I do has be recorded online, and book reviews are included. I was feeling a lot of pressure to write something about every book that came across my path, as though it didn’t exist unless everybody knew that I’d read it, and letting that go has been really freeing and has brought real ease into my reading life.

November 24, 2025

Two Book Giveaways

Who wants to win a copy of CALL ME GRAY, by Andrew Larsen, Bells Larsen, and Tallulah Fontaine? And how about Jennifer Whiteford’s MAKE ME A MIXTAPE?

To enter to win CALL ME GRAY, comment below with your favourite winter tradition. To win MIXTAPE, comment with your favourite ’80s song. (And leave the same comment on my newsletter too if you’d like TWO chances to win!!)

Giveaway closes at the end of November. Canadian addresses only.

November 21, 2025

Future Boy, by Michael J. Fox

I thoroughly enjoyed Michael J. Fox’s new memoir Future Boy: Back to the Future and My Journey Through the Space Time Continuum, written with Nelle Fortenberry. Fox as Alex P. Keaton on Family Ties was my very first crush around the age of 6—the P was an ad lib, the book tells us—and while I didn’t see Back to the Future right away, I became obsessed with it once I finally caught it on VHS, and it’s remained one of my favourite movies ever since, perhaps the beginning of my fascination with time travel stories and a weird relationship with nostalgia that my therapist and I are still working through.

In Future Boy, Fox tells the story of the movie role that launched him to stardom which he nearly didn’t get—he was a last minute replacement for another actor to play Marty McFly, after six weeks of filming had already been completed (although the part was originally written with him in mind!). And in order to fulfill his contract to Family Ties, which rehearsed all day Monday to Thursday, and filmed in front of a studio audience on Fridays, Fox worked on Back to the Future evenings, overnight and on the weekends, all of which made for a schedule that would have been impossible for anybody who wasn’t in their 20s.

But Fox was in his 20s, and he writes about how filming a movie and TV concurrently didn’t really seem any more impossible than the amazing things that were happening to him around that time, when he’d only recently just stopped being a struggling actor eating out of dumpsters. Apparently the Delorean was a bitch to drive and everybody hated it. He writes about being looked down upon by his film colleagues for being a TV actor, and how he challenged the film’s direction by bringing in ad-libbing and making suggestions as he’d become accustomed to doing on Family Ties. Because of his height or lack thereof, they ended up replacing the actor originally cast as Marty’s girlfriend in the film. And he might never have been able to make the movie at all if it weren’t for Meredith Baxter’s pregnancy (she and Michael Gross played his parents on Family Ties, but were only fifteen years older than he was!) which shifted the scheduling of the show.

In the first paragraph of the book, Fox concedes that he understands precisely nothing of Einstein’s theory of relativity or the space-time continuum, but has fun considering the idea that time was played with during the absolutely bonkers scheduling of his life while making the film, and also that time travel may well be a thing, because how else could a 40-year-old movie seem like it was made just yesterday?

November 18, 2025

Sisters of the Jungle, by Keriann McGoogan

In Sisters of the Jungle: The Trailblazing Women Who Shaped the Study of Primates, Keriann McGoogan—herself a scientist whose adventures have included studying howler monkeys in Belize and two years in Madagascar deep into lemurs—considers the question of why so many primatologists are women, especially in comparison with other scientific fields. McGoogan takes the stories of the world’s best known primatologists (I was going to specify female, but I think they’re the best known, full stop)—Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birute Galdikis—and weaves in others from the scientists who’ve built on their legacies in more recent years, along with her own perspective of experiences in the field, and draws a rich history of the evolution of primatology so that the book becomes (amusingly) a study the study of primates. The anecdotes are fascinating and the prose evocative and absorbing, McGoogan effectively balancing the personal and professional in her subjects’ experiences, all the while understanding how the lines are particularly blurred when one is in the field for months at a time.

She shows that while the women she writes about had to contend with sexism and limited opportunities due to gender, they also benefited from male mentors who took them seriously (Louis Leakey’s complicated legacy notwithstanding). And it is especially refreshing to read about the women whose male partners were supportive of their scientific endeavours, and who’ve been able to achieve some element of equality in their relationships, which has also been McGoogan’s experience.

The readability and engagingness of Sisters of the Jungle might belie just what a huge project it must have been to write—this is the history of a scientific field, a biography of at least six different people, plus memoir, and reportage. You get a lot of book in this one book, and it manages to be fantastic and inspiring from start to finish.

November 17, 2025

November Enthusiasms

New issue of my ENTHUSIASMS newsletter is out now, and it contains lots to be excited about, including two book giveaways. Check it out and enter for your chances to win here.

November 14, 2025

The Seaside Cafe Metropolis, by Antanas Sileika

“How is it possible to live under tyranny? One must create a sort of fantasy world to shield at least part of oneself from the oppression. And under this shield, people can make alternative lives for themselves, real or imaginary ones.”

There is no seaside at the Seaside Cafe Metropolis, and there is no metropolis either, instead Khrushchev-era Vilnius, Lithuania, to which Toronto-born Emmett Argentine has followed his idealistic socialist mother and still can’t seem to be unravelled from her apron strings, never mind that he’s the one in the kitchen now, or at least overseeing the kitchen, and the rest of his restaurant, the Seaside Cafe Metropolis, which is indeed a cafe, if nothing else. And also the centre of Bohemian life in Vilnius, although there isn’t much competition for that distinction, and Antanas Sileika’s The Seaside Cafe Metropolis is a rich, funny, and quietly poignant chronicle of this most distinguished undistinguished establishment, where KGB agents listen from the basement to microphones installed at the tables so that nobody can ever say in so many words just how much the Soviet reality has failed to lived up to its promise, but also everybody knows, so nobody has to. And in the meantime, Argentine (not in fact from Argentina) contends with informants trolling for dissidents, securing a jazz band, the mediocrity of Soviet champagne, the dramas of his young patrons (the poet, the philosopher, the sculptor, the artist), a visit from Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, protecting his employees from the terror of the state, and a one unforgettable chain of tragedies involving a lion, each chapter complete with a recipe (“Buckwheat Groats,” “Potato Kugel,” “Herring and Onion on Warm Potatoes”) rounding out this culinary experience, which turns out to be a celebration of community, solidarity, and the transformative power of imagination.

November 12, 2025

Done With Chasing

I am having a harder time than usual selling the spots for my 2026 manuscript consultations, which I mainly spread the word about on Facebook and Instagram, and my husband recently raised the question of whether the fact I’m the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit with Meta might be part of the reason why the algorithm is not favouring my content, and I mean, it’s plausible, no?

But even if it’s not, oh my goodness, I have had it with Facebook and Instagram. It’s all AI slop, confused baby boomers, and posts trying to break my heart or make me angry, even when they’re not stealing my work to run the world with AI. After I read the post from the LA Dodgers pitcher whose baby daughter had been stillborn, Instagram just starting showing me random posts about other people’s stillbirths. I only use these platforms on my desktop (um, because having them on the phone is scientifically proven to destroy one’s mental health), which no doubt is impacting my user experience, but that seems like a weird excuse. Most of the posts I’m shown are suggested posts with clickbait about celebrities I don’t know, scam ads for fake companies going out of business, “life update” posts from people I’ve never heard of, and carousel posts by people I don’t follow captioned “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again…” about their feelings regarding the elf of the shelf.

Whatever I still get out of Facebook and Instagram is in spite of Facebook and Instagram, and because of the human beings who still take time to post and share there, not because of anything an algorithm has ever delivered to me. Which helps me not feel so bad about my posts getting less traction, because it’s all so unpleasant, and I’m going to have to find a way to run my business and get the word out and promote my books away from Meta at some point anyway, because even when they’re serving me, they’re not really serving me—except maybe by feeding my humanity into their gross capitalism machine.

And it feels good to just admit it—that this is a game that I don’t want to play. Instead of trying to contort my life and my self to deliver whatever fickle thing that we’re all imagining that machine is craving so that we might possibly be rewarded (until it starts wanting a different and we have to change again). It’s a game I’m not playing on Substack either, surely to my detriment. But my sense is that focussing on my blog and using Substack to promote this platform is going to be more rewarding in the long run than becoming a star Substacker, even if the result is that I am a fairly middling Substacker, which feels like FOMO sometimes. And that is something I’m not that used to feeling on the internet, having spent 25 years (more than half my life!) with an online platform. Like, usually, I get to be one of the OGs, but on Substack it’s not like that at all. Sometimes I try a little, and other times I don’t, and the results between the two remain consistent.

So I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing. I like Substack because the opportunity to be paid for my work has been meaningful, in terms practical and otherwise, and also because it’s a platform for my podcast (whose Season 4 will be dropping in January!). I joined Substack about the same time that the Notes timeline was rolled out, and I regret that I never got a chance to experience Substack without it, just because the only reason I came to Substack at all was because I was so tired of the incessant chatter of social media and far too many voice in my head.

But it’s here on the blog where my focus will remain, a decision that limits my reach, perhaps, but also means that I’m in control of what I do, that I’m writing for myself, that the people who matter will find me, and people who don’t only mean that I get to write with the lack of self consciousness that makes creativity possible.

November 11, 2025

The Dad Rock that Made Me a Woman, by Niko Stratis

“Dad rock is a guiding principle more than a sound or a guitar tone. Dad rock is comfort in the darkest part of ourselves.”

Niko Stratis’s The Dad Rock that Made Me a Woman is a memoir and a mix tape, an essay collection that weaves music writing and autobiography to tell the story of how songs can be the lights that guide us home—or sometimes just one headlight, in the case of The Wallflowers. I only knew about a third of the songs that inspired the essays in this book, and wondered if I’d be that interested in the essays about songs that were unfamiliar to me, but it turned out that I burned through the whole book like a fire. Each essay is not only about the song that inspired it anyway, just like dad rock is not really about dads, except that sometimes it really as, as Stratis writes about growing up in the Yukon and learning the art of mix-tape making from her dad, along with the glass-making business that would eventually become her trade before she came out as trans in her 30s, and so much else in her life changed.

But before that, she was a kid growing up, watching the world around her to learn what men were, what women were, how gender was performed, how each understood the other. The gendered divisions of labour in the grocery store where she found her first job would eventually come to inform her understanding of all of this, plus her understanding of music as well: “It’s easy to poke fun or mock grocery store radio rock but to me and my heart it always feels like home. Songs live and breathe in stores like this, contain all the breadth of their emotions played through shitty speakers hidden away in the ceilings. The music that moves around bodies as they search for something, lost in thought, walking through the world…”

Like the best mix tapes, this collection is full of wonderful twists and surprises, along with the mainstays—such as what a line like “I want to change my clothes, my hair, my face” might mean to someone who is coming into an understanding of their gender identity. Other connections are less straightforward, and all the richer for it. This is a book with which to broaden your horizons, musical or otherwise.