This year I’ve been reading more non-fiction than usual. It’s not that I’ve been trying, it’s only that I’ve allowed my curiosity to access my holds queue. When I have questions after I’ve finished a novel, I’ve allowed myself to wander more than usual. It’s created an interesting rhythm in my reading log for 2021.

For sure, every year I choose to read eight books about writing (at least). A recent favourite, on a favourite topic, is Lisa Zeidner’s Who Says? Mastering Point of View in Fiction. From a writer’s perspective, her concept of four sliding scales is useful: Closeness to Distance, Empathy to Judgment, Internal to External and Subjectivity to Objectivity. From a reader’s perspective, if you love this device, prepare to add immeasurably to your TBR.

One remarkable book to illustrate this technique is Marlon James’ A Brief History of Seven Killings, which I read at the end of last year. It was in my stack for months—a tough read. And I spent most of the time bowled over by the shenanigans, the political undercurrents, and the chemical haze of it all. But I kept returning to marvel at how deliberately he inhabited each voice. In the end, I was a little stunned. And I realized that I didn’t know what I didn’t know about Jamaica.

So, I put myself on a hold list for Orlando Patterson’s The Confounding Island: Jamaica and the Postcolonial Predicament. When it finally arrived, I was more confounded than before. Even though it opens with epigraphs by Derek Walcott and Claude McKay, this volume is intended for more scholarly readers. (To this end, I’ve added his collection of short stories to my TBR: The Children of Sisyphus.) But I did enjoy the chapter which compares Jamaica to Barbados, because I had recently read Andrea Stuart’s memoir, which traces her family’s history to that island.

Andrea Stuart’s Sugar in the Bloodis immensely readable—an account of settlement and heritage. Readers are rooted by the occasional date and statistic but, for the most part, benefit from her ability to summarize history. Some of this material felt familiar: the talk of uprisings reminded me of Dionne Brand’s beautiful novel At the Full and Change of the Moon (which is actually Trinidadian), and the varied experiences of the enslaved reminded me of Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black (which is a Barbadian story). But the discussion of how whiteness as a concept was developed on this island more so than any other, and historical context, like why some planters ultimately chose to leave for the Carolinas, captivated my attention.

One of these historical American plantations in the Carolinas serves as the off-stage backdrop to Gloria Wesley’s novel Chasing Freedom, whose characters leave it behind for more opportunity in Scotia. Wesley has been described as the first Black Canadian to be published in Nova Scotia, her first poetry collection having appeared in 1975: To My Someday Child. There are some beautiful poetic sentences in this novel too, praised by George Elliott Clarke. [Whose George and Rue is a favourite of mine.]. Though an instructive element occasionally outweighs the plot, this is only the second book I’ve read about Birchtown (the other being Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes) and this is a significant part of Canadian history—just how hard it was in Canada for the “freed” slaves who came here from the United States, trading enslavement for indentured servitude, prejudice and violence.

Although there’s a lot of sorrow and strife in Wesley’s novel, it ends with a marriage—jumping the broom—conducted by a Methodist reverend, which took me to Henry Louis Gates Jr’s The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song. He writes about its cultural importance, a “reprieve from the racist world”. I not only read about conversion, abolition, and civil rights, but I learned about the practicing Muslims from Senegambia who were shipped to Georgia (about 20% of the stolen were Muslims, Gates estimates). Traces of Islam remain in Sapelo Island, home of the Gullah Geechee people, and Gates describes how Islam creolized Black Christianity. This fit brilliantly with my reading of Ayesha S. Chaudhry’s The Colour of God, a contemporary memoir that embraces the complexity of growing up in a fundamentalist Muslim household.

One element of Alex Haley’s Roots (1976), which I read with Liz and Bill, that surprised me was that it was probably my first introduction to the Islamic faith (at least, the little that I would have seen before falling asleep on the couch, watching the mini-series as a girl). References to Christianity were commonplace—even if the Lord’s Prayer was the only one I knew by memory (recited in classrooms daily)—but this would have been new to me. It’s just one of many elements of Kunta Kinte’s daily life that is wrested from his grasp, when he is kidnapped and enslaved to toil in America.

Even though I have always viewed Roots as a novel, it’s technically a biography; Haley, however, having researched the story from genealogical and historical perspectives, used the techniques of fiction to engage readers in his narrative. Another aspect of the story that I found surprising was just now distinct and problematic Kunta’s African-ness was for some, not only the whites at the top of the hierarchy, but most of the other Black people who were further removed from their roots (and those who recognized and internalized white folks’ fear of these different cultures).

These big ideas also surface in quite a different book: Lyanda Lynn Haupt’s Rooted (2021). She writes: “Rooted ways embolden us to remember that with our complex minds we can feel—and live—more than one thing simultaneously. Anxiety, difficulty, fear, despair. Yes. Beauty. Possibility. Connectedness. Love. Yes.” As a longtime fan of her books (beginning with Crow Planet), I was thrilled to read her latest.

When I discovered this passage in it, I was also reading Nadia Owusu’s memoir Aftershocks, also freshly published. Owusu writes: “The idea of roots setting a person free is counterintuitive, but deracination from the past, from land, from family, from mother, makes for an unstable present. We must have, or we will always search for, a place to bury our bones.”

One element of her memoir that I really enjoyed was its bookishness. When she goes off to college, she packs a copy of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (but I don’t think she actually reads it at college) and that spoke to me because it was a formative read for me when I was a student.

Other admirers of Toni Morrison’s debut novel appeared in The Other Black Girl by Zakia Dalila Harris and Dawnie Walton’s The Final Revival of Opal & Nev too. Oh my, how I ADORED Dawnie Walton’s novel.

It wasn’t a subject I particularly thought I’d enjoy (the music industry, collaborations, and marketing) and the characters weren’t easy to hang with (egos and stresses), but sheesh, she swept me away. If it had been a thousand pages long, I’d’ve kept reading. But it wasn’t. Because she’s got composition skills. Fine skills indeed.

In just a line or two of Roger Robinson’s collection of poetry, A Portable Paradise, you recognize his skillz. But I couldn’t remember why (other than his renown) it was on my TBR. With references to the Windrush generation’s threats of deportation and the “Slavery Limerick”, I thought it must have been a recommendation via one of the authors I’ve read on that subject this year. Then, near the end of the volume: “Grace.” A poem that I heard him read on a Guardian Books’ podcast (which I miss!), which was every bit as moving on the page. So heart-ful.

A lighter poem of Robinson’s, about what lurks in the shadows, begins: “In our family we were not allowed to whistle at night.” Which nestled in with this passage in the opening chapter of Anuk Arudpragasam’s The Story of a Brief Marriage, in which Dinesh, one of Sri Lanka’s Tamil citizens, is alone in the dark: “There was, always, before the shelling, for the slenderest moment before the earth began shaking, a faraway whispering, as of air hurtling at high speed through a thin tube, a whooshing, which turned, indiscernibly, into a whistling.”

It also recalled this bit from The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen, in which ‘the call of the Katysha rockets” is remembered as “hissing in the distance like librarians demanding silence”.

And, here, while it’s quiet, I’ll take a breath, because there are just as many connections in Part Two of this post. Meanwhile, the librarians are shushing.

Have there been connections between your fiction and non-fiction reading this year? Either purposeful or accidental?

Are you reading more of one than the other lately, or are your habits in 2021 consistent with other reading years?