As our events season goes into hibernation, I am back to playing around in the jungle of books and illustrations cradled by our stores. My favorite books of the year encompass both works I had the pleasure to launch on my first year as Events Assistant, as well as old and new finds I have collected as I scavenge the shelves.

Please enjoy and stay warm <3

Our Lady of Mile End was undoubtedly one of my favourite books of the year, as well as one of my favorite launches to have hosted. Sarah Gilbert brought the neighborhood’s locals into communion, with guests flocking in and out of La Petite Librairie in order to get a glimpse and their books signed. Despite it consisting of fictional stories, Gilbert truly captures the spirit of the Mile End and the women that have made the quartier what it is today.

Collections by Victoire de Changy is one of those books that I would recommend to readers from any age. I am absolutely obsessed with the illustrations and the poetic renditions of the carefully curated collections of the seven children who make up the book. From horses to seashells to hands, it reminds us of the quirky and playful side of appreciating both art and the world itself.

This blog would not really reflect what I read if I did not include any Moomins in it; I am a sucker for D&Qs glossy Moomin paperbacks! Although this varies by time of the year, my current favorite is Moomin Begins a New Life. Witty, hilarious, and adorable, in this story, the eccentric inhabitants of Moominville are swayed by a charismatic prophet who promises to have the secret to happiness. As he attempts to imbue the town with organized religion, the villagers must question whether this path is truly what is best for them and their chaotic nature.

My favorite book as a child was a Spanish translation of Rebecca Dautremer’s Princesses Oubliées Ou Inconnues. Her eerie and elegant illustrations appealed to my psyche from a very young age, and this identification has not waned. Her most recent childrens’ book, Une Chose Formidable, is a wonderfully surreal take on memory and friendship, embarking the reader on an adventure through time with a bull and a bunny.

I always come back to Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges. Despite having a very identifiable and particular voice throughout his body of work, Borges manages to talk about everything that exists, doesn’t, or that which only might. He masterfully drafts unexpected twists and turns which loom necessary at the moment of the denouement. I am very excited to have chosen a few of the stories in this collection for our upcoming Latinx Book Club, for which you can find more information here!

I must confess I judged The Snakes Came Back by its cover (positive), and my expectations were very much exceeded. Written by Lora Mathis and published by local coup de coeur Metatron Press, it gave me everything I ask for in a poetry book: a contention with the infinite, a Dionysian experience, and a fun play with imagery. Snakes and tongues sharply cut, dreams slither in and out of consciousness, and the body erupts as mythological as it works through trauma, loss, and the infallible persistence of desire.

For our last meeting of the Indigenous Literatures Book Club we selected Jordan Abel’s most recent book, Empty Spaces. Admittedly, I had not yet read the book when I attended the meeting, but after reading a few passages and conversing with the club’s host, Tara McGowan-Ross, I was left with a deep-rooted thirst to finish reading it. We discussed how this book refuses to be categorized, albeit concretely being a reimagining of James Fenimore Cooper’s nineteenth-century text The Last of the Mohicans. As many myths do, it reads as a long-form poem but also as a non-fictional telling of the history of the world. Its experimental and atmospheric tone invokes the earth’s voice, and calls to the readers’ instinctual and intellectual ways of knowing.

The Mysteries by Bill Watterson and John Kascht is reasonably not what I expected from the creator of Calvin & Hobbes, although upon reflection, that comic series spat out a considerable amount of wisdom. Marketed as a “fable for adults” and thus raising more questions than answers, in this new work I found a mature and sagacious reading of humanity and our relationship to what we cannot control. Each illustration is incredibly detailed and moody, making the book feel cinematic and timeless.

Mandraag is an expert at intertwining absurdity and the quotidian in a Kafka-esque manner. His work always feels familiar yet it submerges the reader in situational speculation. I would say Rick and Morty fans might very much enjoy the three ingeneous stories presented in this book, which take place either in an office or in an alternative world where a new religion has its followers spending much of their time in tanning beds. All hail Harvey Knight's Odyssey!