Yesterday, in the wake of the librarians’ shushing, some might have taken advantage of the ensuing silence for a nap. Now, yawning ourselves awake, we can resume our chat about the overlap between fiction and non-fiction, in sprawling and slightly chaotic stacks and shelves.

In the opening story of Juan Gabriel Vásquez’s Songs for the Flames (2018; Trans. Anne McLean, 2021) a woman takes advantage of a quiet moment—against another, unexpectedly violent, landscape—to steal some shuteye. A second woman, looking for her, is surprised to find her asleep, but reacts quickly: “She found her taking a siesta in a hammock and, without warning, took a photograph of her.” Yolanda is reluctant, but she eventually agrees that Jay can take several more pictures, trying to capture just the right look.

This reminded me of a scene in which a sleeping woman was awakened by another woman taking her photograph, also without permission initially, but this time in Catherine McKinley’s The African Lookbook. For decades, McKinley has collected images of women from Africa; they cover a vast swath of time and place. It’s simultaneously the kind of book you can imagine being on a course syllabus, but also the kind that is a true pleasure to leaf through—with occasional text summaries that are informative and inspiring.

There are several photos from 19th-century Senegal, which reminds me of another favourite for this year: Clint Smith’s How the Word is Passed. There’s a lot to admire and appreciate in this volume, but I’m thinking here about how he travels to Dakar, Senegal; there he sees the Door of No Return on Gorée Island, and reads what Angela Davis and President Obama wrote in the guest book, when they made similar journeys:

“Seagulls traced the shoreline with their shadows, their bodies hovering just above the water. I watched as dozens of them lifted their beaks, rose, tucked their wings, and plunged their bodies into the ocean….the centuries-long kiss of salt water.”

The seagulls in Alistair MacLeod’s short stories are often on the scene too, in “The Lost Salt Gift of Blood” more than usual. There, the birds represent what can be broken and what can be restored, how we take on the responsibility for caring for other creatures, and what happens when we cannot adequately protect them any longer.

Many of MacLeod’s stories revolve around the idea of home and belonging. Which is also true of a favourite essay collection I “discovered” this year: Tressie McMillan Cottom’s Thick. There, she writes: “No matter why you leave, home is still home. And nothing is better than home.”

Which I read while enjoying a debut novel by Elias Rodriques: All the Water I’ve Seen Is Running. It opens with a young man’s consideration of a friendship that dates to his teen years. “Audrey asked what The Odyssey was about. I said it was about a man trying to get home. She said that was a silly thing to write a book about. Everyone goes home every day. I said it’s different after years on the road.” For both Daniel and Aubrey, Florida is home: “Three-eight-six till I die.”

This code reminded me of the Lauren Groff short story “Above and Below” in Florida: “Goodbye to the mountain of debt she was slithering out from underneath. Goodbye to the hunter-orange eviction notice. Goodbye to longing. She would be empty now, having chosen to lose.”

And that, in turn, pulled me to Matthew Desmond’s Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, which won a Pulitzer, but was an unexpected joy to read, for its attention to evocative detail and the compassion and dedication required to complete a project like this.

Rooted in Milwaukee, a stand-in for the iconic American urban experience, Desmond moves between trailer park and courtroom, to include Jane Jacobs’ ideas about community alongside individuals’ narratives, where a gesture or vinyl siding “the brownish-white of leftover milk in a cereal bowl” brings experiences of inequity off the page for readers.

Marlon Peterson’s Bird Uncaged challenges readers’ assumptions about justice. His account of childhood, raised by two Trinidadian immigrants, whose options were limited by their undocumented status, sparks readers interest.

The studies he pursued during his ten-year incarceration and “the routinization of guilty, loneliness, and rapid self-deprecation” secure it. He describes the authors and books that freed his creative expression, but afterwards thanks Darnell L. Moore and Kiese Laymon, “who write to live”.

As does Da’Shaun L. Harrison, author of Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness; he references Kiese Laymon’s work as having complicated “understandings of sex, sexual violence, and Desire”.

Kiese Laymon’s Long Division was originally published in 2013 but the author made concessions in the craft of his work that he later regretted; this 2021 edition is true to his original concept. It’s a flip book, so you know it’s going to reflect on matters of perspective and how we create our own narratives, the capacity we have within ourselves to imagine different futures (and re-vision our past). But it opens with such solid coming-of-age characterization that even readers who aren’t committed to experimental forms will be hooked into this network of stories. My favourite part was how he named his characters, which I won’t spoil, other than to say it’s a very bookish book.

Just as Laymon has revised his narrative, Elissa Washuta’s White Magic considers the ongoing evolution of selfhood in this memoir of searching. She is constantly revising her own self, questioning her boundaries in the context of colonization, and I had more to say about her memoir here but, for these purposes, this passage caught my eye immediately: “I have no need—nobody wants me and I want nobody—but I take a condom with an image of a playing card Jack and the words One Eyed Jack.”

Because there was a copy of Heidi von Palleske’s Two White Queens and the One-Eyed Jack on my TBR via Dundurn Press. I knew nothing about this new novel when I began reading. (They sent it, I believe, based on my review of Lauren Davis’ previous book, because she’s blurbed this one and also has a new novel herself from Dundurn this year, called Even So.)

It’s a visceral and sense-soaked story about focus and myopia (also twins and double-vision), trauma and inheritance, artistry and changelings: Heidi von Palleske answers questions like ‘how many suitcases are necessary to pack an eye?’ but poses more questions than she answers. And, apparently, there are more volumes to come. It began slowly for me, but as I got acquainted with the characters, my pace increased.

A contrasting reading experience, for me, was Elizabeth Nyamayaro’s I Am a Girl from Africa, an exceptionally engaging memoir from the start. Presenting her story in swiftly moving scenes, with sensory detail that makes them powerfully and immediately relatable, readers will find it hard to put down the work after even a few pages presenting her experiences as a girl in Zimbabwe.

It would make a fine companion to Emmanual Mbolelo Refugee (Trans. Charlotte Collins); a narrative rooted in the DRC which is deliberately and concisely structured, but relays information as though from a few more paces away from the events unfolding; this allows for some broad-stroked patterns and systemic realities to be understood. Together these are an amazing duo.

Where Nyamayaro’s story intersects with the fiction in my stack is in her experiences having travelled to Uruguay to observe where women are aiming to transform politics. Via passing legislation to ensure that 30% of election candidates be female (it was under 13% previously). Because, meanwhile, I was reading Pedro Mairal’s The Woman from Uruguay (Trans. Jennifer Croft): “That was Montevideo to me. I was in love with a woman and in love with the city where she lived. And I made up everything about it, or almost everything.” Mairal’s novella is executed cleanly and sharply, and I intended to read a couple of chapters in the first sitting but read until the end.

Another volume I read straight through—not for pleasure, but as research—was Anna Leonowens’ The English Governess at the Siamese Court (1870). It’s most famous for having been the inspiration for Margaret Landon’s Anna and the King of Siam, which was, in turn, transformed into the musical The King and I. It opens with a description of the author on board the small Siamese steamer Chow Phya in the Gulf of Siam in March 1862: “I rose before the sun, and ran on deck…peered eagerly, not through mist and haze, but straight into the clear, bright, many-tinted ether, there came the first faint, tremulous blush of dawn.

A memoir that moved very slowly for me, a few pages at a time, as though I could not process the reading of it any more quickly than Kat Chow could process her grief, was Seeing Ghosts. Early on, she describes seeing her mother’s body unclothed: “I understood, as I looked at you that our bodies were similar, that I was an extension of you, that I came from you, that I could one day become like you.”

It reminded me of how Alex Haley describes Kunta Kinte’s growing awareness of the world around him and the importance of kinship. As a child, he gradually comes to understand relationships, and his role in the family. “But Kunta had never truly understood until now that this man was his father’s father, that Omoro had known him as he knew Omoro, that Grandma Yaisa was Omoro’s mother as Binta was his own. Some day, he too would find a woman such as Binta to bear him a son of his own. And that son, in turn…” Then, in the nighttime, he falls asleep.

The sun is of titular importance in Kazuo Ishiguro’s most recent novel and, early on, readers learn about Klara’s ritual of observing its setting: “The Sun had become just a short line glowing through the grass. ‘There he goes,’ Josie said. ‘Hope he gets a good sleep.’”

It looks like the Sun sets in a neighbour’s barn, although Josie suggests that a palace would be a more suitable residence for the Sun and wonders if maybe the entrance to the imagined palace is hidden. Even though I was unsure whether I would enjoy Ishiguro’s novel in my current reading mood, I stayed up late to finish reading the first part and had to resist the urge to read on even then.

This kind of falling-into-a-book feeling is wonderful but, admittedly, it’s not one I experience as often as I used to, before a package of sticky-notes became my constant reading companion. Ishiguro’s novel reminded me of this kind of shine on the relationship between reader and writer.

Two other writers acknowledge the relationship from another perspective, at the end of their books. At the end of Kaveh Akbar’s Pilgrim Bell, the author’s second collection, published by Graywolf this year, he writes: “Reader, thank you.” And suspense writer, Nadine Matheson, debut author of The Jigsaw Man, she concludes: “And finally, thank you, dear reader for buying my novel.”

And, so, I could end this by saying both Thank You and You’re Welcome.

It’s been an amazing reading year so far. And yours?