I did the math and reckoned that I read at least 3500 pages between September and early November for a reading course at school. What that meant, however, was that in late November when I caught a garden-variety cold, Dave suggested I curl up in bed with a novel. Which felt like a novel suggestion after months of reading theology, but also a very good one, and I’m back in my reading pattern again. Because of school, I didn’t always track the number of books I read this year, but I imagine you are here for the book recommendations not my personal stats, and I can certainly give you recommendations.

10 – Restoration by Rose Tremain – I pick up books like toddlers pick dandelions and small stones, although I am usually willing to leave them unfinished if I am not enjoying them. I picked this book out of our neighbour’s little library, not expecting much, but I was quickly hooked. And then I discovered that this book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize when it came out in 1989. It has a really strong voice in it and is a long and winding tale of self-discovery. One of my favourite parts was the first chapter where the first person narrator tries to decide how best to tell his story. Since I am studying theology, it occurs to me as I write about it that in a strange way this book is a modern-day Ecclesiastes where the character tries to discover the meaning of life. Only with more sex scenes and humour and pathos. I read the more recently written sequel, Merivel: A Man of His Time, and liked it much less. This one is a good escape that’s well written.

9 – Once Upon A Wardrobe by Patti Callahan. This is a brand new book that imagines what’s behind C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books. The author also wrote  Becoming Mrs Lewis several years ago, which I’m not sure I loved. I took this out from the library, willing to put it down if I didn’t love it, and instead I devoured it. I knew much of Lewis’s own biography but it’s woven beautifully into a story about a sibling pair whose own poignant story appeals to the Lewis brothers who share their stories in a roundabout way of telling how Narnia came to be. There are some slightly far-fetched and sentimental plot points but mostly this is a subtle and beautiful book, and it was a lovely one to read on a snowy early winter afternoon.

8 – The Madness of Crowds by Louise Penny. Like the cowboys in Brokeback Mountain, I can’t quit Louise Penny’s Three Pines books. Like a favourite longstanding television show, the writing waxes and wanes but once you’ve fallen in love with the characters, you’re usually willing to go along for the ride. Not everyone loved this particular book but I did and I think Penny is writing at her best again. It’s set back in Three Pines in a post-pandemic world Penny assumed was on the horizon when she wrote it, but also deals with some of the ugliness that happened during the pandemic in Quebec in particular, including what happens when people band together or are isolated together.

7 – The Constant Rabbit by Jasper Fforde.  Full disclosure: I adore Jasper Fforde. I discovered his writing when he published The Eyre Affair. His ability to create worlds is second to none. He’s hilarious and satirical and possibly insane. This was the novel Dave suggested I read when I was sick, and it was just so much fun but also such a great commentary on our society and our fear of The Other. In this book, The Other are rabbits, and the book is set in the present, fifty years after the Spontaneous Anthropomorphizing Event when suddenly rabbits more or less became human. This book was written in the shadow of Brexit and Black Lives Matter and Trump’s wall and treatment of immigrants and all the other social movements that polarize society and call us to do better. This book isn’t any kind of straight allegory but more a fantastical look at where this can go. But it’s also good fun and very wickedly clever. Highly recommended!

6 – Lying Awake by Mark Salzman.  This is a small and beautiful book about a difficult choice faced by a contemporary nun who is blessed with visions that may actually have a medical cause. It explores the nature of faith  and it’s just exquisite and complicated. I would recommend it to people of faith and people who aren’t religious at all.

5 – Death of My Aunt by C.H.B. Kitchin. This book was published in 1929. I found it in an article about terrific midcentury British murder mysteries that have been forgotten, and I bought it on Kindle. It deserves a rediscovery. I’m not giving away too much to say that the narrator is the one who actually delivers death to the victim but in a way that is innocent. The narrator is an everyman who has read murder mysteries before and knows the conventions. He doesn’t become the detective but when he’s detained at the house where the death occurred, with other suspects, he does quite naturally spend some time trying to figure out how this could have happened. But this is not a fluffy character either but a surprisingly sympathetic, unique and compelling one, trying to find his way through a difficult situation.

4 – Improvisation by Samuel Wells. Maybe you have to be a theology student to read this book written by an Anglican vicar and professor of ethics, but it truly was one of my favourite books of the year, despite my lack of particular interest in ethics. I’ll give you a summary of the big argument of the book: instead of approaching ethics from a traditional way, Wells argues that the church can draw from its history (including the events of both the Old and New Testament and the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, as well as the history of the Christian church) to improvise ethics much as a theatre company does, having immersed itself and then adapting to new situations. I would argue that this approach could be used more widely than with ethics in order to think about how deep faith formation can then allow us to relax in the moment, like a well-conditioned athlete or members of a theatre company. It’s readable and thoughtful.

3- Faith and Art by Makoto Fujimura. I think this was a social media recommendation, a new book by the visual artist Fujimura who uses traditional Japanese art disciplines and precious raw materials to make the most stunning abstract art. But Fujimura is also a theologian and further someone who has experienced significant loss and trauma. In this book, he reflects on how art and faith intersect for him, and writes beautifully about the idea of kintsugi, the art that arises out of brokenness. It seems like a fine pandemic read. I read it while I was away on a writing retreat in a beautiful space and that made it all the better. Even if you don’t read the book, go have a look at his art: https://makotofujimura.com/

2-Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr. Anthony Doerr is – without Doerr’s knowledge but with my husband’s consent – my literary boyfriend. After he wrote All the Light We Cannot See, he probably became everyone’s literary boyfriend but I do encourage you to look at his backlist, the books and especially the short stories he wrote before that book was published. He writes in exquisite detail about so many different places and times and things that you think he must have lived an extraordinary life to even know as much as he does. He lives in Idaho. I read this book as an advanced reading copy sent to me by my lovely literary agent, Don Pape, who knows of my love of all things Doerr. When I began it, I wasn’t sure I would like it. It includes many points of view in many times and places. It was more than a bit daunting. But I trusted Doerr to somehow bring it all together and maybe you can trust me that he really does in unexpected ways. This book is also a love letter not to me but to books and libraries and texts and the people who love them and preserve them and pass them along. It’s a little bit ancient and a little bit sci-fi, and—again, we can trust Doerr to make this combination work. If I’m honest, it doesn’t match All the Light, but it’s finer than most writing out there and it’s heartfelt and bright.

1-Crow Lake by Mary Lawson. I mentioned how I read Art + Faith on a beautiful writing retreat. Sometimes where you read a book affects how you read it, and sometimes – like a wine pairing with a meal – you can choose a book to read to suit a place. Last year, when my husband and I first drove up to Lake Superior on a pandemic road trip, we listened to an Audible book of Waubgeshig Rice’s super scary Moon of the Crusted Snow, set in a northern Ontario reservation, cut off from the rest of the world. This summer, we drove up to the same place and I could recall where on the road or the lake we had listened to certain parts of that story. We also brought a new story with us, new to us anyhow, from a writer I should have known about because her writing is wonderful. Mary Lawson has written a collection of books set in a small fictionalized northern Ontario town called Crow Lake. This book is her first novel, about a family in the aftermath of an event that created a Before and After. But there’s humour and love and the most beautiful hard-won realizations as well as horrifying tragedy. It has an incredibly strong sense of place and family. I don’t think you need to drive through northern Ontario to read it, nor do I know if it will make you want to, but you will almost for sure love it.

Two last things: a note that in 2023, I will have a book being published by Inanna Publications, so I suppose I can predict the #1 read for that year. Also, my husband and I have continued to watch classic movies most Friday evenings so I’d like to share a few of our (somewhat unexpected) favourites from 2021, in case you want to watch movies instead of reading: Diva, Soylent Green, Gaslight, The Great Escape, The African Queen.