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For some, summer is reading season; a brief but important window to set aside time for that activity, and the only time to do it – comfortably – outdoors.
If, for you, the question isn’t who to read, but what kind of book to read, then here’s a list of promising, genre-specific (in some cases, very specific) new titles to consider. (NB: no thrillers or mystery here. Sorry.)
Books we're reading and loving this week: Globe staffers share their book picks
I’d like to read …
… something to help me grapple with the spectre of AI
The Singularity Is Nearer, Ray Kurzweil (Viking, June) Google’s director of engineering popularized the ominous-sounding notion of the Singularity – in which AI and other technologies would intermingle to surpass human intelligence – in 2005′s The Singularity Is Near. This update looks, on the sunny side, at AI’s promise when it comes to subjects such as renewable energy and clinical medicine, and, on the darker one, at how AI could lead us – God forbid – to “an existential catastrophe like a devastating pandemic or a chain reaction of self-replicating machines.”
Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI, Madhumita Murgia (Henry Holt, June) In this eye-opening, globe-spanning account which was nominated for the inaugural Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, the author – the first AI editor at the Financial Times – looks at the humans toiling behind the AI headlines: from image-taggers in Nairobi enabling driverless car systems to activists cracking the code of Orwellian biometric technologies used to control China’s Uyghur population to women fighting back against the proliferation of deepfake porn on the internet.
… a novel with a tinge of the strange or fantastical
The Bright Sword: A Novel of King Arthur, Lev Grossman (Viking, July) Grossman made his name with The Magicians, a fantasy trilogy that’s been described as Harry Potter for adults. This one does something similar as it builds, over 688 pages, a psychodrama out of the attempt of the remaining knights of the Round Table and other sundry Camelot hangers-on, to fill the void left after an heir-less Arthur dies in battle.
Gretel and the Great War, Adam Ehrlich Sachs (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June) In 1919, an apparently mute young woman found wandering around the streets of Vienna comes into the care of a neurologist, who appeals to the public for information about her. Soon after, a man in a sanatorium claiming to be her father starts sending a collection of cleverly intertwined bedtime stories – the latter comprising the meat of this book by a promising American writer – about 26 unusual people, organized alphabetically by their vocation.
The Lost Tarot, Sarah Henstra (Doubleday, June) In Henstra’s first novel since the Governor-General’s Award for Fiction-winning The Red Word, a junior art historian in turn-of-the-most-recent-century Toronto receives a mysterious, and possibly career-making, tarot card in the mail, the event kicking off a dual narrative whose other half involves an avant-garde, occult-dabbling English artist who may have created the card back in the 1930s.
… a memoir or biography
North of Nowhere: Song of a Truth and Reconciliation Commissioner, Marie Wilson (Anansi, June) Wilson, an erstwhile journalist who was one of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s three commissioners, gives a first-hand account of the experience of travelling the country for six years to gather testimony from residential-school survivors, one of whom is her husband, Stephen Kakfwi, 16-year premier of the Northwest Territories. Wilson reflects, additionally, on what the Commission has and could still accomplish.
Under a Rock, Chris Stein (St. Martin’s Press, June) This chattily readable memoir by the Blondie guitarist helps round out the official account of the band’s history begun in 2019 by Stein’s one-time paramour Debbie Harry, with the publication of her book Face It. Alongside requisite tales of drugs, booze, celebrity hangs and obsessive fans are others related to Stein’s mostly happy upbringing by communist-sympathizing, Lead Belly-listening parents in 1950s Brooklyn.
Impossible City: Paris in the Twenty-First Century, Simon Kuper (PublicAffairs, June) “This is the book of an outsider looking in on a city that is itself full of outsiders,” writes the author, a British-born sportswriter at the Financial Times whose move from London to Paris more than 20 years ago was never meant to be permanent. Now a French citizen, he here relates experiences ranging from the quotidian (biking, real estate, croissants) to the serious (ethnic segregation, terrorism).
Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell, Ann Powers (Dey Street Books, June) “Dazzling” and “vibrant” are some of the adjectives cropping up in early reviews of this admiring but unfawning biography of the brilliant, protean and sometimes prickly Saskatoon-born singer-songwriter. Powers, an NPR critic, says she approached this project hoping that, in writing it, she could “find another Joni Mitchell, one less worshipped but better understood.”
… something about technology being used to help the natural world
The Nature of Our Cities: Harnessing the Power of the Natural World to Survive a Changing Planet, Nadina Galle (Mariner Books, June) In Maastricht, the Netherlands, a neighbourhood-killing freeway is buried instead of widened, its surface transformed into an urban park teeming with biodiversity; in Chicago, green infrastructure is used to divert potentially catastrophic flooding. Galle, a Dutch-Canadian ecological engineer, details these and other inspiring examples of citizens and urban ecologists harnessing new technologies to restore a natural balance to human environments.
What the Wild Sea Can Be: The Future of the World’s Ocean, Helen Scales (Grove Atlantic, July) “In the messy midst of the changing ocean, so much has already been damaged and destroyed that discerning what the future may hold requires a careful balance of optimism and pessimism.” Scales, a British marine biologist and author of The Brilliant Abyss, mostly skews to the latter in this book about what can, and is being done to restore the fragile ocean (she uses the singular form of the word) back to health.
Sing Like Fish: How Sound Rules Life Under Water, Amorina Kingdon (Crown, June) Fish, apparently, don’t just sing, they chorus like birds (though as one marine biologist informs the author, the simile should be inverted, since fish preceded birds by millions of years, evolutionarily speaking). In this account, the Victoria-based science writer shows how technology is revealing such underwater acoustical marvels, and how we humans are blithely drowning it all out.
… some social history
Lytton: Climate Change, Colonialism and Life Before the Fire, Peter Edwards and Kevin Loring (Random House, June) Though its population was only about 250 when it was destroyed by wildfire, in 2022, the B.C. village of Lytton quickly became an international emblem for the stakes of climate change. Here, two sons of the town – Loring, a Governor-General’s Award-winning Indigenous playwright and Edwards, a true-crime writer – burrow into the past to ask what a tiny place like Lytton can say about a much bigger one: Canada.
The Garden Against Time, Olivia Laing (WW Norton, June) “I wanted to move into a different understanding of time: the kind of time that moves in spirals or cycles, pulsing between rot and fertility, light and darkness.” Laing, author of The Lonely City et al., uses the beguilingly unkempt garden of a house she bought in Suffolk, England, during the pandemic as the starting point for a ruminative exploration of, among other topics, how utopian ideals and class inequality have intersected historically with the seemingly innocuous practice of gardening.
… something political
Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, Anne Applebaum (Signal, July) Hearkening from a variety of ideologies and countries, the modern-day autocrat is, alas, not as easy to spot as the cartoonish one of yesteryear. The Pulitzer Prize-winning long-time Washington Post columnist has written a kind of field guide to the type, who, we’re told, are as likely to agglomerate power and wealth through “kleptocratic financial structures,” and through each other, as through military might and party machinery.
The Worst Songs in the World: The Terrible Truth About National Anthems, David Pate (Dundurn, August) The national anthem got its start in London, 1745, when God Save the King was sung spontaneously by performers at a Drury Lane theatre with the intent to rally an audience unnerved by recent uprisings in Scotland. The genre survives, according to this deeply researched history by an ex-CBC journo, thanks to sporting events and the Olympics, even though most of the world’s anthems promote non-sporting values, like the non-metaphorical slaughtering of enemies.
… some short stories
Waiting for the Long Night Moon, Amanda Peters (HarperCollins, August) Her debut novel, The Berry Pickers, about a Mi’kmaq family from Nova Scotia whose youngest daughter disappears from a Maine blueberry farm, made a serious splash south of the border, where it won the Barnes and Nobel Discover Prize and the Carnegie Medal of Excellence in Fiction. The Annapolis Valley, N.S.-based writer follows up that effort with this collection of stories focused on traditional Indigenous storytelling and “the power to endure.”
Hello, Horse, Richard Kelly Kemick (Biblioasis, August) The animal world interacts with the human one in confounding and sometimes wondrous ways in Kemick’s first collection, which abounds with the poet’s sideways, observational writing. A description of one character reads: “She had all the trappings of beauty but was actually quite ugly.”
… a novel in translation
The Utopian Generation, Pepetela (Biblioasis, August) First published in Portuguese in 1992, this decades-spanning anti-colonialist novel from the early sixties by Angola’s most prominent writer (real name: Artur Pestana dos Santos) involves a group of students in Lisbon who, faced with the prospect of being conscripted to suppress a political uprising in their native land, end up (like Pepetela himself did) as guerilla fighters in Angola’s brutal 14-year war.
The Anthropologists, Ayseg̈ul Savas (Bloomsbury, July) “Deceptively spare” is an often used to describe fiction, but rarely so accurately as with the well-received novels of the Turkish-born, U.S.-based writer Savas. In this one, she privileges the emotional truth over plot in a tale of two scholarship students from different, unnamed countries hunting for an apartment in an unnamed city.
… some essays
Any Person Is the Only Self, Elisa Gabbert (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June) In the strong opener in this collection of book- and reading-focused essays, The New York Times’ On Poetry columnist explains her obsession with the “recently returned” section at her local library. Elsewhere, she attempts, with the occasional pop-culture injection, fresh takes on canonical figures such as Mary Shelley, Sylvia Plath, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust and Joan Didion.
Marrow Memory: Essays of Discovery, Margaret Nowaczyk (James Street North Books, June) In this slim but wide-ranging collection, the author, a clinical geneticist at McMaster Children’s Hospital, touches on the youthful shock of immigrating to Canada from communist Poland in the early eighties, her obsessive search for her early ancestors and the practice of “narrative medicine,” which looks to literature as a model for understanding patients’ stories and experiences.
… a promising (fiction) debut about a group of friends
Evenings and Weekends, Oisín McKenna (HarperCollins, July) The image of a beached whale in the River Thames presides over this perspective-shifting novel about three millennials grappling with distinctly millennial issues – sex, money, gay-straight relationships, housing precarity, the environment – over a single tense, sweltering London weekend in 2019, the last summer before lockdown.
Living Things, Munir Hachemi (Coach House, June) Named one of the best young Spanish-language novelists by Granta, Hachemi’s short, sharp novel, which won a PEN Translates award, is about four university-age pals from Madrid who travel to the south of France to harvest grapes, only to end up working on an industrial chicken farm in abject conditions.
Hides, Rod Moody-Corbett (Breakwater, June) Decorous elegance characterizes the prose in this novel about a junior English professor from Calgary who, against the backdrop of a looming federal election and raging wildfires, reluctantly overcomes cognitive dissonance to attend a hunting weekend in Newfoundland, organized to commemorate the mass-shooting death of his best friend’s son.
… non-fiction about a few years in a historical figure’s life
Origin Story: The Trials of Charles Darwin, Howard Markel (WW Norton, June) Markel’s history focuses on the two tumultuous years around the writing and publication, in 1859, of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, during which his infant son died of scarlet fever, and Darwin developed a mysterious gastro-intestinal condition so dire he was forced, owing to “fits of flatulence,” to miss the first formal debate about his paradigm-shifting theory at Oxford University.
Alexander at the End of the World: The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great, Rachel Kousser (HarperCollins, July) In 330 BC, Alexander could have justifiably returned to his home of Macedonia after defeating his greatest rival, the Persian king Darius III. Instead, he headed east, with the modest aim of conquering the world. The author, a classicist and art historian, investigates that decision while also arguing that the following, and final seven years of Alexander’s life – which would see him loving, fighting and engaging in hand-to-hand combat with lions – were what earned him that “Great” moniker.
… a profanity-laced novel
Liars, Sarah Manguso (Hogarth, July) The poet and essayist’s first book, Very Cold People, made best of the year lists in multiple prestigious publications (including this one). Already garnering rave reviews, this new one uses terse, pent-up prose to depict the slow, 14-year implosion of a marriage – between Jane, an American poet, and John, a Canadian filmmaker – riven by professional jealousy.
The Heart in Winter, Kevin Barry (Knopf, July) The International Dublin Literary Award-winner (for City of Bohane) seems to have forged, in the form of a characteristically outlandish love story set amidst Irish immigrant workers in late 19th-century Montana, a genre we didn’t know we needed: the Potato Western. I’d give you a sample of the Irishman’s entertaining prose, but most of it is, sadly, unquotable in a family newspaper such as this.
… a novella
Yesterdays, Harold Sonny Ladoo (Coach House, June) Ladoo died violently and tragically during a visit to his native Trinidad shortly after the publication of his first novel, No Pain Like This Body (1972), considered by many an undersung classic of golden age Canadian literature. This Rabelaisian, darkly humorous account of a Trinidadian man’s attempt to launch a Hindu Mission in Canada to convert the country’s heathen Christians, was first published posthumously before going out of print for years.
Craft: Stories I Wrote for the Devil, Ananda Lima (Tor, June) This surrealist novel-in-stories (which has garnered a strong plug from Kelly Link) by a Brazilian-American writer slyly comments on the American immigrant experience through the story of a woman who is forced to spend years grappling with the Devil in his many guises after sleeping with him at a Halloween party in 1999. (Adding legitimacy to the book’s subtitle is a dedication that reads “For the Devil.”)
… a novel about female connection set in Japan in the 1970s
Mina’s Matchbox, Yoko Ogawa (McClelland & Stewart, August) There are echoes of The Secret Garden in this coming-of-age story by one of Japan’s best-known and most decorated contemporary writers, narrated retrospectively by a woman looking back to 1972, when she was sent, at the age of 12, to stay at her aunt and uncle’s lavish mansion in the hills. In this world apart from the world, she bonds with her bookish, asthmatic cousin Mina, whose prized possession is a collection of illustrated matchboxes, and whose fragile state requires that she be conveyed to school by the family’s pygmy hippo.
The Art of Vanishing, Lynne Kutsukake (Knopf, June) This sophomore novel by Kutsukake, a third-generation Japanese Canadian whose The Translation of Love won the Canada-Japan Literary Award and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Literary Fiction, invokes the ethos of the art world in 1970s Tokyo as it tells the story of Akemi and Sayako, young women whose class-defying connection gets ruptured when Sayako goes missing.
... a posthumously completed novel about an art-world doyenne
Peggy, Rebecca Godfrey, with Leslie Jamison (Knopf Canada, August) Shortly after her death in 2022, at the age of 54 from cancer, the husband and agent of the Canadian writer Rebecca Godfrey (The Torn Skirt, Under the Bridge) approached her close friend, the novelist and essayist Leslie Jamison, to ask if she’d be willing complete Godfrey’s unfinished novel about heiress art-collector Peggy Guggenheim. Peggy is the result of that difficult commission (a process Jamison wrote about at length in a recent New Yorker article).
