Just Say Oh to Drugs and Books Read in 2024: Four-Star Non-Fiction and Fiction

I've had a couple of bemusing interactions recently - the kind where I couldn't figure out if I was being weird or they were. One was a Japanese teacher who came in to the library the morning of Chinese New Year and asked me in a concerned manner if I thought her dress - floral with a mandarin collar - was cultural appropriation. The other one was actually just an overhear - I was walking towards the library and I saw an EA standing in an open doorway answering a teacher, "no, I don't have any kids. I'm only 26." This didn't strike me as super weird, but would you say that? 26 isn't old, but it seems amply old enough to have kids, surely? 

So remember the Gabapentin my doc prescribed before Christmas to try during the daytime for fibromyalgia pain, but I was holding off on trying it because it causes drowsiness and then I forgot all about it until my massage therapist mentioned it a couple of weeks ago? I know, probably not, neither did I, lol. I started trying the full dose of it while home from work the last week or so. It helps a bit with the pain. It does not make me 'drowsy' so much as 'high as fuck'. After spending most of Friday eating Arrowroot cookies, fake swimming around the kitchen and texting my friends to come over so I could kiss their foreheads and nestle them in my bosom, I decided that I should maybe not take the full dose until I can take the lowest dose without losing my shit entirely. 

In the meantime, let me know if anyone wants a forehead kiss. 

Non-Fiction

Making Love With the Land: Essays by Joshua Whitehead: Synopsis from Goodreads: A moving and deeply personal excavation of Indigenous beauty and passion in a suffering world.

The novel Jonny Appleseed established Joshua Whitehead as one of the most exciting and important new literary voices on Turtle Island, winning both a Lambda Literary Award and Canada Reads 2021. In Making Love with the Land, his first nonfiction book, Whitehead explores the relationships between body, language, and land through creative essay, memoir, and confession.
In prose that is evocative and sensual, unabashedly queer and visceral, raw and autobiographical, Whitehead writes of an Indigenous body in pain, coping with trauma. Deeply rooted within, he reaches across the anguish to create a new form of storytelling he calls “biostory”—beyond genre, and entirely sovereign. Through this narrative perspective, Making Love with the Land recasts mental health struggles and our complex emotional landscapes from a nefarious parasite on his (and our) well-being to kin, even a relation, no matter what difficulties they present to us. Whitehead ruminates on loss and pain without shame or ridicule but rather highlights waypoints for personal transformation. Written in the aftermath of heartbreak, before and during the pandemic, Making Love with the Land illuminates this present moment in which both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people are rediscovering old ways and creating new ones about connection with and responsibility toward each other and the land.

Intellectually audacious and emotionally compelling, Whitehead shares his devotion to the world in which we live and brilliantly—even joyfully—maps his experience on the land that has shaped stories, histories, and bodies from time immemorial.

The four-star rating is a lie. I didn't 'really like' it. Memoirs are difficult to rate. Memoirs by minorities that exhibit deep trauma and pain, even more so. I respected the vulnerability and passion of this book. It doesn't feel right to say 'it didn't work for me' like I could for a work of fiction, but it was a book of essays that I probably shouldn't have read all at once, and the writing techniques are daring and defiant, but also sometimes read like a relatively new creative-writing student seeing how much he can do by breaking words into their separate parts or playing with language ('savage - sauvage - sausage') and using repetition and eschewing punctuation. Some of the big, exuberant metaphors end well, but then vanish under a mountain of subsequent adjectives. Using the Oji-Cree language without translations is totally fair, but got tiresome and alienating after a while - I fully accept that this might have been the entire point of it. 

I wanted to say I loved it - I wanted to love it. I believe some people loved it, and I believe some people were afraid to say they didn't. Some people DID say they didn't and got flamed for it, and I regret that I wasn't as brave. This kind of thing is quite fraught. 

Dear Girls: Intimate Tales, Untold Secrets & Advice for Living Your Best Life by Ali Wong: Synopsis from Goodreads: Ali Wong's heartfelt and hilarious letters to her daughters (the two she put to work while they were still in utero), covering everything they need to know in life, like the unpleasant details of dating, how to be a working mom in a male-dominated profession, and how she trapped their dad.

In her hit Netflix comedy special Baby Cobra, an eight-month pregnant Ali Wong resonated so heavily that she became a popular Halloween costume. Wong told the world her remarkably unfiltered thoughts on marriage, sex, Asian culture, working women, and why you never see new mom comics on stage but you sure see plenty of new dads.
The sharp insights and humor are even more personal in this completely original collection. She shares the wisdom she's learned from a life in comedy and reveals stories from her life off stage, including the brutal singles life in New York (i.e. the inevitable confrontation with erectile dysfunction), reconnecting with her roots (and drinking snake blood) in Vietnam, tales of being a wild child growing up in San Francisco, and parenting war stories. Though addressed to her daughters, Ali Wong's letters are absurdly funny, surprisingly moving, and enlightening (and disgusting) for all.

First book since Let's Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson (the Bloggess) that made me laugh so hard while reading in bed that tears ran down my face and the bed shook so much that my husband had to go sleep somewhere else. The device of addressing it as letters to her daughters is weird and inappropriate, like much of her comedy. I love all of her stand-up specials, and she's just as funny in writing - a bit surprisingly, there are a few solid life lessons also. I hate the cover though - I don't get it, what? Why?

In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife by Sebastian Junger: Synopsis from Goodreads: A near-fatal health emergency leads to this powerful reflection on death—and what might follow—by the bestselling author of Tribe and The Perfect Storm.

For years as an award-winning war reporter, Sebastian Junger traveled to many front lines and frequently put his life at risk. And yet the closest he ever came to death was the summer of 2020 while spending a quiet afternoon at the New England home he shared with his wife and two young children. Crippled by abdominal pain, Junger was rushed to the hospital by ambulance. Once there, he began slipping away. As blackness encroached, he was visited by his dead father, inviting Junger to join him. “It’s okay,” his father said. “There’s nothing to be scared of. I’ll take care of you.” That was the last thing Junger remembered until he came to the next day when he was told he had suffered a ruptured aneurysm that he should not have survived.
This experience spurred Junger—a confirmed atheist raised by his physicist father to respect the empirical—to undertake a scientific, philosophical, and deeply personal examination of mortality and what happens after we die. How do we begin to process the brutal fact that any of us might perish unexpectedly on what begins as an ordinary day? How do we grapple with phenomena that science may be unable to explain? And what happens to a person, emotionally and spiritually, when forced to reckon with such existential questions?

In My Time of Dying is part medical drama, part searing autobiography, and part rational inquiry into the ultimate unknowable mystery.

Do you have a rough plan of what you're going to read next? I sort of do, and then every once in a while I pluck something from the express ebook library that I didn't really think I was going to read. I did that with this.

Sebastian Junger is a journalist and author, and he writes about shipwrecks and war and has been embedded with soldiers. For this reason, I completely logically and fairly decided that he's probably at least a bit of a douche. Reading this book didn't exactly confirm this suspicion, but didn't exactly quash it either.

I did find it a little bit humorous that Junger was at great pains to be very clear that he was a prime physical specimen, and it was super weird that he almost died. He had 'none of the risk factors' for a heart attack. This problem wasn't 'a result of a lifetime of indulging'. It seemed important to him to be blameless in this issue. Which he is, mainly, but he is not blameless in the case of being a dumb man who doesn't go to the doctor. The first time he feels the pain he "inexplicably thought that this is the kind of pain where you find out later that you're going to die." Then the pain came and went for months. You know what he didn't do? Bingo - go to the doctor.

Then there's some pretty cool and insightful writing about death. And some extremely interesting writing about his father and other family members, such as his great aunt who was tutored and then impregnated by Erwin Schrodinger (the cat guy), and their connection to the founding fathers of quantum physics. Then there's another clunky clueless moment as he talks about what the quantum physicists were doing; "The men (they were virtually all men) had set out to pry the universe open by the sheer power of their intellects..." They were ALL MEN? No fucking shit, Sebastian, it was the 1920s. 

The contrast between some of the robust scientific and metaphysical writing and the unforgivably mawkish chronicling of his young daughters' wisdom ("The rain wouldn't erase my drawings if it saw how beautiful they are" - even if she really said that you can't put it in a book because GAG) is a jarring contrast. The spurring event of this book was that he has a vision of his father as he is near death, which he finds inexplicable. This confuses me - doesn't it seem like an eminently believable thing that your brain would manifest loved ones who have died to make you less afraid of dying? He seems to think he's made some mind-blowing discovery, and I am perplexed.

Anyway, I found this immensely entertaining, and I can see why he's a respected journalist. I enjoyed my mental arguing with him. I still think he's probably a bit of a douche, but probably fun to go drinking with.

Fiction

Prairie Edge by Conor Kerr: Synopsis from Goodreads: The Giller Prize-longlisted author of Avenue of Champions returns with a frenetic, propulsive crime thriller that doubles as a sharp critique of modern activism and challenges readers to consider what "Land Back" might really look like.

Meet Isidore “Ezzy” Desjarlais and Grey Ginther: two distant Métis cousins making the most of Grey’s uncle’s old trailer, passing their days playing endless games of cribbage and cracking cans of cheap beer in between. Grey, once a passionate advocate for change, has been hardened and turned cynical by an activist culture she thinks has turned performative and lazy. One night, though, she has a revelation, and enlists Ezzy, who is hopelessly devoted to her but eager to avoid the authorities after a life in and out of the group home system and jail, for a bold yet dangerous political mission: capture a herd of bison from a national park and set them free in downtown Edmonton, disrupting the churn of settler routine. But as Grey becomes increasingly single-minded in her newfound calling, their act of protest puts the pair and those close to them in peril, with devastating and sometimes fatal consequences.

For readers drawn to the electric storytelling of Morgan Talty and the taut register of Stephen Graham Jones, Conor Kerr’s Prairie Edge is at once a gripping, darkly funny caper and a raw reckoning with the wounds that persist across generations.

Every year I take a stab at reading all of the Giller Prize short list books and all of the CBC Canada Reads books. I think I've only managed it once. This is the only one of the Giller nominees I read this year - Held by Anne Michaels won, and I read Fugitive Pieces years ago and I thought as a novelist she was an excellent poet. 

I read Avenue of Champions by this author also, a Giller Prize nominee in 2022, and it was excellent as well. This one renders the passion and excitement and disillusionment of activism, and the bittersweet frustration of an uneven romantic relationship, through the lens of the Indigenous experience in Canada. Land Back is an Indigenous-led movement that seeks to reassert the control of Indigenous people over Canadian land. Ezzy and Grey decide to fast-track their challenge to colonialism by capturing bison from a national park and setting them free in downtown Edmonton. It's stupid and irresponsible and kind of cool, and by the way, bison are enormous and capturing them is really hard and dangerous. 

It's a strange experience reading this kind of literature. It's difficult and upsetting, and that's fair, but it feels like bearing witness isn't enough. We fucked these people over so thoroughly and generationally, and well and good that this kind of thing is getting published, but... I guess in some ways reading is a radical act, and in some ways, what do we do after that?

Mayflies by Andrew O'Hagan: Synopsis from Goodreads: From the widely renowned author Andrew O'Hagan, a heartbreaking novel of an extraordinary lifelong friendship.

Everyone has a Tully Dawson: the friend who defines your life.

In the summer of 1986, in a small Scottish town, James and Tully ignite a brilliant friendship based on music, films and the rebel spirit. With school over and the locked world of their fathers before them, they rush towards the climax of their youth: a magical weekend in Manchester, the epicentre of everything that inspires them in working-class Britain. There, against the greatest soundtrack ever recorded, a vow is made: to go at life differently. Thirty years on, half a life away, the phone rings. Tully has news.

Mayflies is a memorial to youth's euphorias and to everyday tragedy. A tender goodbye to an old union, it discovers the joy and the costs of love.

A bit of an echo of the end of The Body by Stephen King (made into the movie Stand By Me): "I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?". Those friends that it feels like you'll never grow away from, those convictions so closely held about how you will live your life. And will you be willing and able to follow through on the promise "if you ever need anything, just pick up the phone"? Read for book club - it was a bit of a whirlwind, spare and colourful, with dialect and references that can be demanding, and then an unflinching detailing of a difficult ending. Is it true, though, that everyone has a Tully - a friend who defines your life? Surely some people ARE the friend? And is it good to have a life-defining friend?

Hello Beautiful by Anne Napolitano: Synopsis from Goodreads: An emotionally layered and engrossing story of a family that asks: Can love make a broken person whole?
William Waters grew up in a house silenced by tragedy, where his parents could hardly bear to look at him, much less love him. So it’s a relief when his skill on the basketball court earns him a scholarship to college, far away from his childhood home. He soon meets Julia Padavano, a spirited and ambitious young woman who surprises William with her appreciation of his quiet steadiness. With Julia comes her family; she is inseparable from her three younger sisters: Sylvie, the dreamer, is happiest with her nose in a book and imagines a future different from the expected path of wife and mother; Cecelia, the family’s artist; and Emeline, who patiently takes care of all of them. Happily, the Padavanos fold Julia’s new boyfriend into their loving, chaotic household.
But then darkness from William’s past surfaces, jeopardizing not only Julia’s carefully orchestrated plans for their future, but the sisters’ unshakeable loyalty to one another. The result is a catastrophic family rift that changes their lives for generations. Will the loyalty that once rooted them be strong enough to draw them back together when it matters most?

Vibrating with tenderness, Hello Beautiful is a gorgeous, profoundly moving portrait of what’s possible when we choose to love someone not in spite of who they are, but because of it.

I kept seeing this book and this cover and somehow it made me assume the book was something completely different than it is, and I felt no desire to read it. I wish I could remember why I decided to take a crack at it anyway, and then oh my goodness I could not look away. The first part about William's childhood was so suffocatingly sad, and then he meets Julia, and I was sort of on board with the whole "wow, can you just decide that you are in love with someone and they are in love with you and make everything fall into place by sheer effort of will?" and then oh, dumbass, of course you can't, right, that makes so much more sense.

Everything worked for me - the writing style felt so .... ahhhhhh, why can't I describe anything anymore, I am running out of words. Natural, unforced, falling into place neatly and sweetly, sort of weighty and weightless all at once. It had an irresistible rhythm, and I literally had to force myself to put the book down. Many characters had completely different arcs than I expected, but I immediately saw how my expectation was rightly subverted. 

Scarborough by Catherine Hernandez: Synopsis from Goodreads:City of Toronto Book Award finalist Scarborough is a low-income, culturally diverse neighborhood east of Toronto, the fourth largest city in North America; like many inner city communities, it suffers under the weight of poverty, drugs, crime, and urban blight. Scarborough the novel employs a multitude of voices to tell the story of a tight-knit neighborhood under among them, Victor, a black artist harassed by the police; Winsum, a West Indian restaurant owner struggling to keep it together; and Hina, a Muslim school worker who witnesses first-hand the impact of poverty on education. And then there are the three kids who work to rise above a system that consistently fails. Bing, a gay Filipino boy who lives under the shadow of his father's mental illness; Sylvie, Bing's best friend, a Native girl whose family struggles to find a permanent home to live in; and Laura, whose history of neglect by her mother is destined to repeat itself with her father. Scarborough offers a raw yet empathetic glimpse into a troubled community that locates its dignity in unexpected a neighborhood that refuses to be undone. Catherine Hernandez is a queer theatre practitioner and writer who has lived in Scarborough off and on for most of her life. Her plays Singkil and Kilt Pins were published by Playwrights Canada Press, and her children's book M is for A Pride ABC Book was published by Flamingo Rampant. She is the Artistic Director of Sulong Theatre for women of color.

I had Crosshairs by this author highly recommended to me a few years ago and found it a little disappointing. This book, on the other hand, wrecked me. Scarborough is about five hours south of where I live. I appreciated having this loving but clear lens focused on the area. The stories of generational trauma, and parents who want desperately to do what's right for their children but are lost for positive parenting role models. The grinding poverty and harassment by the police. The glimmers of hope and joy in spite of everything, and the people trying against immense odds to help. The characters were intensely real to me. I did a little research after finishing the book and, encouragingly, there seem to be actual programs resembling the one featured.