When my oldest was little, he had a lot of ideas and I asked him where he got them from. “From my throat,” was his answer, words emerging through his vocal cords to be breathed out as new ideas. It’s not that different for me with reading. I pick up ideas everywhere. When I was on holidays this past summer, a woman I met turned out to be a library book buyer whose recommendations have formed quite a list for me. I grabbed at least one of this year’s top 10 books from my neighbour’s little library and another from one of my kids.

You may notice that my list of books is not a list of the best books published in 2022. I like what the writer CS Lewis said: “It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.”

Lewis’s idea of old books included Plato and Aquinas, and he did also observe that “since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books” but he suggested that a new book is still on trial.

When I look at the 58 books I read this year, many of the books I read were older books—including a long stretch where I read clever murder mysteries from the 1920s and 1930s. I also read Margaret Atwood’s take on the Odyssey, The Penelopiad, while my husband was travelling in Greece and I was left home alone. Despite the parallels, that book didn’t make my top 10 this year.

But determining a top 10 was challenging. It wasn’t hard to go from 58 to 14 but those last four pushed really hard to be included in the list. (OK, fine, in no particular order the four that got cut were Theater of War: What Ancient Greek Tragedies Can Teach Us Today by Bryan Doerries; The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow; Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen, We Are the Light by Matthew Quick; and An Interrupted Life by Etty Hillesum…and yes that makes five. They’re multiplying.)

With that aside, I present the countdown of my favourite reads from the past year. (Also, if you’d like to hear more from me about reading and writing and stories and story community, read to the very bottom of this post for a way you can do just that!)

10. Crow Winter by Karen McBride. (Harper Collins, 2019) I’m actively trying to decolonialize my reading so that I’m not only reading old dead white guys (although I have always tended to read a few more women authors than average). At the same time, I still want a good read, so when I recommend Crow Winter to you, it isn’t simply because it’s an Indigenous story but because it’s a really good story too. This book is set on an imaginary Indigenous reservation in Quebec some time after the death of the father of the main character. The book weaves Canadian and Indigenous history with Indigenous mythology and magic realism, along with a very human story about grief and healing. This is McBride’s first book and I look forward to reading more from her in the future.

9. An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace by Tamara Adler (Scribner, 2011). What you need to know is that I pride myself on a particular aspect of housewifeliness and that is the ability to make delicious meals out of seasonal foods and what is on hand, and the related ability to minimize or eliminate food waste altogether. What you also need to know is that this book was an utter revelation to me. It is essentially a cookbook but not the kind you’re probably thinking of. It’s closer to being a book about a philosophy of cooking, one that is about knowing the best ways to cook different kinds of food, and understanding how to make the most out of your food and cooking in terms of both time and money. Adler makes creative use of many bits and pieces that formerly found their way into my compost bin. The essays in this book changed something in my brain (and my stomach) when it comes to eating. She has a new book coming out too but this is a book to savour and chew on.

8. The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng. (Myrmidon, 2011).Some books make an impression on the reader because of where and when the reader was at the time of the reading. I sometimes select books to bring with me to read in order to make such an association. (What comes to mind most clearly with this is reading Waubgeshin Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow while driving in northern Ontario.) This book I read in my own backyard, but I read it during the week that my husband was on his first overseas trip since the start of the pandemic. This is a highly atmospheric book about memory and forgetting, about art and love and loss. Set largely in an exquisitely designed garden in Malaya in the aftermath of the Second World War, this novel is itself exquisitely crafted and profoundly moving. At least it was the week my husband was far away.

7. The Way Out: How to Overcome Toxic Polarization by Peter T. Coleman (Columbia University Press, 2021). I read this book for school, for a course on leadership, but I was also thinking about a book I was writing (a novel that is scheduled to be published in 2023! Stay tuned!) that includes a topic that is often polarizing. My book doesn’t take a polarizing approach and that was a challenge when it came to finding a publisher. But Coleman’s book talks about the very real polarization we are experiencing in our culture and in our homes and churches—Trump? Vaccines? Refugee treatment? He examines how we have been divided, the naïve attempts to overcome ideological division, and then presents innovative and practical ways that we can find a way out of the place we find ourselves in. Coleman observes that most of us are part of the growing “miserable middle majority,” “the ‘exhausted majority’ [who] were fed up with our state of dysfunction, despised our contemptuous condition of polarization, and were eager to find ways to talk, compromise and work together again.”  This book offers a creative approach to doing just that.

6. Rest is Resistance by Tricia Hersey (Hachette, 2022) Author Tricia Hersey is the self-titled Nap Bishop but any suggestions that her work is one of simply feel-good self-care are quickly put to rest. Instead, Hersey roots her writing and her work in an attempt to resist grind culture, something she sees as deeply rooted in white supremacy. She draws on a powerful legacy of her Black ancestors who resisted a culture that dehumanized them and worked them like machines, but she is clear that all of Western society needs to learn how to resist by true rest for all. This book is challenging but its challenge is to be human, and to rest. 

5. The Age of Creativity: Art, Memory, My Father and Me by Emily Urquhart (The Walrus Books, 2020). Some of this book is very close to home for me in more than one sense: writer Emily Urquhart spent some of her childhood years living a few streets away from where I now live, with her parents, artist Tony Urquhart and writer Jane Urquhart. The book also touches a nerve for me as it is a loving exploration of accompanying a father through a journey with Alzheimer’s, something that has become part of my own story in the last year. Even as Emily Urquhart’s father begins to lose his memory, she recalls her experiences of him and his art, but also explores creativity and how it can shift and change as we age and even sometimes as we lose our memories. This book is neither melancholic nor does it deny the losses, but ultimately it is creative in every sense and loving to the core.

4. The Prison Bookclub by Ann Walmsley (Viking, 2015). When we think about bookclubs, too often we think about a group of middle-class women, book in one hand (maybe) and glass of alcohol in the other hand (probably) and this was the author’s experience of reading until she was invited to join a brilliant Canadian woman who had begun a bookclub in a men’s prison in Kingston, Ontario. Today Bookclubs for Inmates (http://www.bookclubsforinmates.com/) has expanded across the country to more than 20 prisons but was in its early days when Walmsley, herself a journalist and a previous victim of a violent crime, gathered her courage and her curiosity to help facilitate a prison bookclub. This is largely a memoir but an unusual and interesting one where Walmsley takes the reader through her own experience and into the lives and stories and reading experiences of the inmates she meets and befriends. I read this book on holidays and it held my attention to the end.

3. Contact by Carl Sagan (Simon & Schuster, 1985). I think this is the only older book on the list (written in 1985 and made into a 1997 movie I never saw). One of my kids was reading this book this summer and lent it to me when they were done. I immersed myself into the world, a world in which a scientist suddenly discovers a clear signal coming from outer space. It’s a book about time and space in which the past—whether Hitler or your dad—comes back to haunt you and a book where home can be farther or closer than you think. I devoured it and was absorbed into its storyworld, and it was one I kept thinking about and mentally living in long after I finished reading it. The dialogue, it must be said, is terribly clunky but the plot, the prose, and apparently the science, is stellar.

2. A Curious Faith: The Questions God Asks, We Ask, and We Wish Someone Would Ask Us by Lore Ferguson Wilbert (Brazos Press, 2022). I’m going to describe this book and you’re going to dismiss it. You’re going to say—as I nearly did when I heard people raving about it—that you might be a person of faith yourself but you don’t really read books written for a churchy audience because they’re just too churchy and simplistic, and you can find your questions and your beauty and your faith in the human experiences of general-market books. I’m with you there. I also nearly dismissed this one without reading it because I am naturally a person who asks questions and loves the questions of God. I wondered whether this book was a clever attempt to try to get people who have dismissed God to consider God. It occurs to me that I thought I had all the answers about this book before I picked it up. But what this book did was to disarm my answers and my assumptions. It’s written in short chapters and I read a chapter a day, savouring it and mulling over the question of the day. I don’t even want to tell you too much about this one, other than to say that it wasn’t what I expected, that it was real and deep and beautiful, and it made #2 on my list even before I’d finished reading it. I would highly recommend this one.

1. Still Life by Sarah Winman (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2021). My notes for this book say that it is generous, kind, magical, masterful, magical, leisurely, and an homage to my beloved Florence and its admirer E.M. Forster. The book takes place over forty years but it is still somehow an intimate story about friendship and love and found families and kindness, and it manages to be beautiful without being precious, and affectionate without being sentimental, clever without being pretentious. In a year when I had a tough time winnowing down my top 14 books to 10, I had no trouble at all choosing this one as my favourite book of the year. In fact I may pick it up to read it again now.

So here’s the announcement I promised higher up. I’m starting a newsletter for those who love stories and talking about stories and writing stories and seeing how stories transform our lives. It will come out monthly and it’s free. All you need to do is sign up here:  http://eepurl.com/igbhY5 One of the things the first newsletter will tell you about is something else I’m starting in January: a winter bookclub. I hope you’ll sign up and and that you’ll tell others about it too. Happy reading!