Favourite Reads of 2020

My reading habits changed this year, and for the first time, I have audiobooks and eBooks on my list of favourite reads. It's also all non-fiction. As much as I could have used a dose of escapism this year, I seemed drawn to deep dives on important issues. 

So, in no particular order, here are the ten books from 2020 I'd highly recommend. 

• The Skin We're In by Desmond Cole (Watch the CBC documentary of the same name here)
• They Said this Would be Fun by Eternity Martis
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Cars? by James Wilt (Here's Shawn Selway's review in the Hamilton Review of Books)
• Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space by Amanda Leduc (Here's another review from the Hamilton Review of Books)
• This Is Not the End of Me by Dakshana Bascaramurty
• The Conscious Creative by Kelly Small
• Small, Broke, and Kind of Dirty: Affirmations for the Real World by Hana Shafi
• Missing from the Village by Justin Ling
• No More Nice Girls: Gender, Power, and Why It's Time to Stop Playing by the Rules by Lauren McKeon (Read my review at rabble.ca)
• I Want You to Know We're Still Here: A Post-Holocaust Memoir by Esther Safran Foer

Honourable Mentions

Here are a few memorable books I read this year that weren't from 2020. Add them to your list!

• Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good by Adrienne Maree Brown
• Older Sister. Not Necessarily Related: A Memoir by Jenny Heijun Wills
• Daughters of Silence by Rebecca Fisseha 

(I also read Normal People for a third time. It's a problem.)

Searching for Evidence of Ancestors: Lauren Carter 's Following Sea

This review originally appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine. 

The first poem in Following Sea, Lauren Carter’s second collection of poetry, stands alone, untethered from one of the book’s five sections. Titled “Historian,” it’s set in modern day, a contrast from most of the other 49 poems inhabiting Carter’s meticulous look at family history and human migration.

I find
them: pressed
between pages, those sudden
cursive blooms

she writes in this first piece, searching for evidence of her ancestors’ lives on reels of microfiche and on the pages of worn ledgers.

Centred on the Canadian settler experience of her great-great grandparents, John Willson Chisholm (1823-1900) and Margaret Patterson (1824-1891), Carter crafts a narrative. With finely tuned attention to detail and elegant language, she fills the gaps between dates found on census records and land registers, weaving together family lore, Canadian social history, and genealogical research to imagine their joyful celebrations, gruelling physical labour, and daily burdens. 

Read the full review here.