The list I made last November with #NovNov in mind is a snapshot of an ambitious reader’s brain, high on bookish possibilities. You recognise the vague outlines that persist, when one is away from one’s bookshelves but in a planning mood, unbound.

The titles listed in black are all from my own shelves, except for the one with a cover similar to Stéphane Larue’s chunky novel The Dishwasher (translated by Pablo Strauss). This one I’d noticed one day in the local library, but not until I’d gotten home did I realise I’d left it behind.

I knew I could find it again, like a homing pigeon, on my next visit. And, after I had, I wandered the remainder of the stacks and picked up the titles listed below, in purple.

That Charles Yu quotation, I jotted down while browsing online one day, suspecting that these notebook pages would eventually contain book notes or book lists. I like the idea of being able to stretch the reading time in the present. And my novella reading plans from November have certainly stretched a long way. All the way into 2024.

From Last Year

P. Djèli Clark’s Ring Shout (2020) is propelled by dialogue and imagery, haints and half-faced creatures, rooted in folktales though the epigraphs from ex-slave narratives, translated from the Gullah, root readers in reality too. “Watching these Klans shamble down the street, I’m reminded of bales of white, still soaked in colored folk sweat and blood, moving for the river.” It ends with a bang and a cake: my favourite kind of story.

Lisa Dillman’s a master shape-shifter as translator of Signs Preceding the End of the World, Yuri Herrera’s 2015 genre-busting novella. Makina is on a quest, in search of her brother and of a kind of stability she’s never known. The struggles are of-this-world but also of epic proportions; the characters feel like mythic structures and, yet, there’s a sense of investment: readers want good things for Makina and her loved ones. The story feels like something you’ve read before and nothing you’ve ever read before, simultaneously. It’s both completely familiar and totally strange. (AndOtherPress, U.K. indie)

Keath Fraser’s Charity (2021) is a psychologically rich story about a network of family and love relationships that pulses and constricts as missed connections accumulate and refract. Everyone’s expecting something and nobody’s clear on anyone else’s expectations (sometimes not their own either). Both young and old, alike, are dissatisfied, yearning, in this uncomfortable but oddly compelling story. (Biblioasis, Canadian indie)

I read Hazel Jane Plante’s Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) (2019) over many days, one day for the segment which introduces the friendship permanently fractured by Vivian’s death and one day for each of the letters in the alphabet that catalogue elements of a fictional TV series the two women watched together obsessively (Vivian started it). The ABCs are part homage to their friendship and part homage to pop culture: playful and strange and, most of all, saturated with that peculiar density that exists when someone who’s never felt so completely understood in their whole life loses the person who was there when that happened. Thanks to Cindy for recommending this…it took me awhile. (Metonymy, Canadian micropress)

Shy (2023) by Max Porter was a birthday present from Mr BIP. Porter is preoccupied by loss and the unique fractures humans suffer in grief, the lingering trauma that holds a shape in one’s everyday. Shy isn’t good company for others in his life when readers meet him, and his world seems like it’ll never again be righted. But he is in the company of others who struggle: nice for him, but readers are antsy. “They each carry a private inner register of who is genuinely not OK, who is likely to go psycho, who is hard, who is a pussy, who is actually alright, and friendship seeps into the gaps of these false registers in unexpected ways, just as hatred does, just as terrible loneliness does.” Porter has explored this theme before and his expertise results in a taut and haunting form.

This New Year

Octavia Cade’s The Impossible Resurrection of Grief (2021) landed in my stack because of Arboreality; it arrived with a signed plate by the author tucked inside, which reads “More jellyfish than humans have been to space.” This made me sad, instantly, because I’ll never recover from Laika. But the novella is not a quiet, meditative piece on grief; it’s vivid and scenic, and things happen. To begin with, The Grief is a condition, a response to the extinction and devastation caused by the climate crisis. But Ruby—who’s described as a “a jellyfish kind of girl” as a result of her passion for creatures who have flourished in the climate crisis—is dealing with a personal grief, too, because one of her close friends suffered from Grief and Ruby couldn’t help her. When she receives a packet of letters in the mail, she follows the breadcrumbs into a wholly unexpected situation. This is one of those disappear-into-it-and-don’t-look-up novellas. (Stelliform, Canadian indie)

But one advantage of being late with this post? Now several of these are pertinent to #ReadIndies month!