My Reading Year (part two)

Happy 2025, friends. I’m back to talk about the books I read in 2024. This is part two of this book-year discussion: there’s a whole part one in a previous post but there’s no need to read it unless you are curious, a completist or I haven’t covered a genre of your particular interest in this one. There is no larger arc, I don’t think?

Also, while I’m preambling, a few housekeeping matters that either came up in the survey or might be of interest to some of the new subscribers this week (hello, pals!) or likely I have just been remiss in not stating much earlier:

• I’ve been a little spotty over the holiday season, but Rose-coloured generally appears in inboxes twice a week, Sunday/Monday and Thursday. If you ever feel like it has been too long since you’ve seen one, please check your spam or promotions folders, move any strays you find to your main inbox, and please add Rose-coloured to your safe senders list.

• I have realized many people can’t see the photos I’ve been inserting in the newsletter—I don’t know what’s going on with that, but I’ll try to figure it out. They’re never narratively essential but if you are curious you can click the “read online” option at the top of the email and the photos should be viewable that way (guest posts tend to have more, the RR original posts are not very photo-heavy).

• Viewing online will also allow you to see and add comments, if that is your jam. If you want to share your views with me alone or just can’t figure out how to add a comment, you can simply hit reply to the email and it’ll come to me. If you reply to a guest post, I’ll make sure the relevant person sees it.

• Also available online is the full archive of posts, if you think you missed one or want to see what went on before you subscribed or if you never want to subscribe but just to read on occasion.

I hope this is helpful. I’m still learning about the newsletter-creation process so there are still hiccups, but I’m getting better. And now, more book highlights from 2024…

Memoir I said in the first part of this review that I read a bunch of memoirs in 2024 but upon closer inspection, not really that many—I guess it’s just that those I did read hit hard. Cody Caetano’s Half-Bads in White Regalia: A Memoir is something I picked up after seeing the author read movingly—it’s about reckoning with the past and trying to learn from it. Caetano has been praised his completely unique voice and that is true; the unusual prose style forced me to slow down and pay attention to some distressing events. A strange and resonant book. The truly odd Rental Person Who Does Nothing by Shoji Morimoto, I’m pretty sure in translation from the Japanese by an uncredited translator (at least on the internet; I borrowed the copy I read and no longer have it) is about a guy who rents himself out to be with people on the condition that they don’t really ask him to do very much. It seems to be about the condition of loneliness in contemporary city life, and Morimoto hints at some dark history in his own life, but it is dressed up with quirky anecdotes. I am very late to the party on Ayelet Tsbari’s The Art of Leaving, but I’m glad I final got to this memoir in essays. This peripatetic collection spans close to thirty years, several continents, and many moods, and really shows a lot of the scope of what memoir can do. As an accidental memoirist myself, i found it inspiring. The Knowing by Tanya Talaga is not exactly a memoir, being a family history, a history of the residential schools in Canada, and a personal history of the author’s work to uncover the small and large damages done in those schools to her family specifically and to Indigenous people across the country. As a book it is a tour-de-force and as a reading experience it is a cataclysm. Took me a long time to read and I will never forget it.

Poetry I read disappointingly little poetry in 2024—one of my reading resolutions is a more poetic 2025! But Laurie D. Graham’s contemplative eco-poetry in Fast Commute and Gerald Arthur Moore’s personal, grim, and funny Flak Jacket were both excellent, if that has to be it. is that really it? I guess so? More poetry this year!

Short Stories Also not a short story collection year for me—it was really the year of the novel for me! But I read some good ones, in addition to the Carol Shields and Mavis Gallant classics mentioned in the previous post. Danila Botha’s Things That Cause Inappropriate Happiness had a whole slice of dark sweetness that I wasn’t expecting and Carleigh Baker’s Last Woman was an absolute joy, especially the perfect pandemic story I’d been waiting for. Avalanche by Jessica Westhead was a new kind of story collection for me, with an activist critique flavour, but still with JW’s wry humour—very hard to be that funny when you’re forcing the reader to take a hard look themselves. Cocktail by Lisa Alward was nominated for/won a bunch of prizes deservedly and was indeed great, though Ididn’t love every story. Five Tuesdays in Winter by Lily King was an unexpected surprise, as I’ve never heard the author, but it’s really just a solid, excellent collection. And Hingston and Olsen’s Short Story Advent Calendar, which I read every year, is just always very fun.

I’m going to have to cover novels in yet a third instalment of this epic series, along with books for young people. I will be skipping the self-help books I read—I do read them from time to time—because they tend to be fairly terribly written, no matter how good the content, so they are hard to critique (and somewhat embarrassing to own up to). I don’t have a section for pans, as I select books fairly carefully and also am a fairly generous reader—once I’ve bothered to get into it, I’m inclined to try to find something to like. But I absolutely loathed The Beesting by Paul Murray, despite seeing it on many best of the year lists. What a melodramatic silliness. I didn’t believe a word of it, and yes, I know it’s fiction. But there’s fiction, and then there’s whatever that was. Blech. (most the links here lead to publishers’ or authors’ sites, but this one leads to my enraged Goodreads review).

I also don’t have a section for serious non-fiction, because I read so little but Africa Is Not a Country by Dipo Faloyin was outstanding, funny, readable, deeply educational, though I did feel a little like it was a remedial text for North American dummies who went to bad schools. Which fair enough describes me.

PS: My talented friend Stuart let me help make a tiny video for the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research. Even if you are very tired of me after this long post, please click on the video, up their view count, and learn something interesting about genetic mutations and cancer!

<3

RR