Can you believe we are barrelling into the last month of the year?! It’s getting very close to the time when our Best Of posts need to be created!
For awhile now, I have been meaning to write a What I’ve Been Reading Lately post, but these past 6 months have been a tremendous and taxing one overwhelmed with work. There is nothing quite like an intensive audit to sideline everything else!
While I was reading steadily, it was around September where my reading seemed to have fallen off and hit a slump. The last book I read that knocked my socks off was one that took me most of the month of August to read: The Eighth Life by Nino Haratischwili. A 944-page tome of absolute epic-ness. What a journey, what a story, I felt lost and empty without being fully immersed in the lives of the Jashi family any longer. This one is absolutely worth the investment of your time. Absolutely.
I was reading some good books, I mean, it’s always a delight to read a new Helen Simonson and I quickly read through The Hazelbourne Ladies Motorcycle and Flying Club, and then there was The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, but nothing was hitting the mark quite like The Eighth Life. Was this because of how all-consuming my job became during this time? because of how unfocused it made for my reading? but I did know that it seemed like whatever I was picking up it ended up being “just okay” or was quickly returned it to the shelf or the library after reading only a few pages.
I did finish two series, one being Stephen King’s Mr. Mercedes series. While I loved how the title fit so perfectly to the end of this series, and how the story of Hodges ended, The End of Watch was a frustrating read for me. I found it so repetitive and it took so long to come to its conclusion, or it just spun around and around repeating the same things. I have however, just downloaded If It Bleeds on Audible so I can continue reading about Holly Gibney and of course I have Holly on my shelf to read too. King has announced he has a new Holly Gibney coming so I need to be completely caught up for Never Flinch. Holly is an excellent character! But in terms of the Mr. Mercedes trilogy, it is Mr. Mercedes that has remained my favourite. That would be followed by The Outsider. So of course I’m looking forward to seeing how If It Bleeds and Holly work for me.
The other series is one I started and finished this year. It was the year of Greg Iles and his Natchez Burning trilogy-turned-saga since he added a fourth in the series, Southern Man. My absolute favourite remains Natchez Burning. That book had a massive hold on me, shook me around left me depleted after finishing. None of the others were able to achieve anything close to those feelings. Notably, Southern Man bordered on painful – it was astonishingly long and I was begging for my life for it to end.
This year also marked the first year to not participate in the Giller Prize through my role as a juror in the Shadow Giller. I knew there was absolutely no way with the workload from the audit facing me this year that I would be able to provide an ounce of effort to reading any of the books or provide any meaningful participation. However, my other Shadow Giller jurors were not responsive to participating in the Giller Prize given everything surrounding its sponsorship with Scotiabank (the reason for most of the SG jurors), actions by its Executive Director and as well, of former winners of the prize (these were added to my reasons). My opinion (and it is my opinion I’m expressing here, it is nothing that has been shared with me outside of what I’ve been seeing and reading) is that we could very well be witnessing the demise of this prestigious prize.
I have already been thinking of and planning out my reading year for 2025. The pretty successful “Chunkster Reading” will continue, but I think some of it may shift to a focus on reading the Classics and the “Classic Chunksters 2025” may be the direction I take. I’ll post more on this and how this idea came to me later.
For now, that’s the update – it’s been such a long one coming! However…..and I know I seem to promise this every year….but I do hope to return to posting with greater frequency in the new year!
Stay tuned for the Best of 2024!
