No preamble needed, here are some books I liked!

Motherhood // Emancipation

A lot of graphic novels made it into my favourites this year, including The Hard Tomorrow (Eleanor Davis) and Creation (Sylvia Nickerson). The former: the story of a near-future couple fighting for community, hope, and the family they hope to build together. The latter: a memoir of isolation and single parenthood in a rapidly gentrifying Hamilton. Both concern themselves with small moments of connection, using them to ground and justify survival through difficult times.  

FutureHorror for a New Decade

For my summer reads I wrote that "BTTM FDRS (Ezra Claytan Daniels, Ben Passmore) and Alienation (Inés Estrada) pack a one-two punch of near-future body horror, allowing the all-too-real terrors of gentrification, displacement, and climate collapse to bob and weave around symbiotic life forms and posthuman parasites." The sentiment still rings true; these are necessary graphic novels.

Growing Up // Heading Out

Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me (Mariko Tamaki, Rosemary Valero-O’Connell) and Leaving Richard's Valley (Michael DeForge) offer complementary coming of age stories. Tamaki's lifeless relationship that refuses to die carries all the pathos of teenage love, while DeForge's comic-a-day experiment follows ex-cult member animals exiled to the rough streets of Toronto. We all need to grow up sometime. 

The Novel as Tapestry 

Form and time become unmoored in I Become a Delight to My Enemies (Sara Peters), where the voices of an unnamed town rise together to tell the story of the brutality they have survived. Flights (Nobel winner Olga Tokarczuk) weaves together memoir, short story, and natural history in its exploration of travel, permanence, bodies, and souls. Both stretch and pull, reshaping the novel into something new and beautiful.  

Tricks // Truths

The essay might be my favourite form, to sit with, sink into, fill my mouth with. Trick Mirror (Jia Tolentino) compulsively delves into the petty, the small, the ungracious depths inside us with admirable kindness. Again from the summer: "Alicia Elliott’s A Mind Spread Out on the Ground approaches suffering, legacy, and racism with fearlessness and grace. The collection of essays is as necessary as it is visceral, offering a deft touch that nevertheless refuses to turn away from the treatment of Indigenous people in North America."

Small Books, Big Thoughts

The Xenofeminist Manifesto (the Laboria Cuboniks collective) presents a feminism for the 21st century, one that doesn't fail to anticipate the potential and danger of technology, globalization, identity. In Females (Andrea Long Chu), "female" is defined as an underclass forbidden a full expression of self. With such a premise, we cannot help but all be female, and all hate it. Neither book wastes words or pages in making their compelling, convincing, arguments. 

Poems to Plug Wounds

The tender cyborg of Franny Choi’s Soft Science grieves without shame, returning to the loss and pain of each new poem with an openness that should satisfy the most relentless Turing Test. A Fortune for Your Disaster (Hanif Abdurraqib) is similarly filled with grief; The intimacy of the pain ripples outward, showing Abdurraqib for the incisive cultural critic he is.