Category Archives: Erin’s Favourite Books

October 25, 2026 · 4:07 pm

The Things We Never Say: Ooooof

It’s hard to choose among my favourite authors, and maybe a Favourite favourite isn’t necessary, but boy does Elizabeth Strout make a strong case for being my Favourite. I saved this one for a weekend when I knew I needed a book to keep me and it doesn’t fail in this promise.

Following Artie Strout in his years of teaching high school, in his discoveries about himself and his family, his desire to die and then to live, and the small moments throughout it all that make Strout unrivalled in being so spectacular. The book deals a devastating blow midway through (and in a parenthetical aside, no less) that let’s the form do what the theme is insisting: that the things, the people, the moments that shake and shatter your life are rarely those that you Expect in a Big Way, but are rather the things you didn’t see coming excpet sideways, or happened so quietly you didn’t realize they were going to resonate quite so much, or are when someone pulls you aside and bam hits you with information that tilts everything you thought you knew.

From a family of educators it was also a book about the impact and beauty of teaching. And as a student who still – often – thinks with such gratitude of the teachers that shaped me in ways they probably also thought of as parenthetical to the rest of their work, it is a book that reminds us all of the influence we wield, whether we recognize it as such or not.

And a book about believing – against all odds and evidence in this moment – that people can be more than their worst moments. That we might all, somehow, be able to come out of our current set of interlocking crisis if only we could do so together, and with something like care for one another, or if not ready care, then an optimism that we might be able to be better. Together.

All to say: I really, really liked it.

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September 6, 2026 · 1:22 pm

Whistler: I Loved It

Did I love Ann Patchett’s Whistler for the book itself or for the experience of reading it? Hard to say. It’s been so long since I’ve read a book in deep immersion. You can blame the pandemic, or parenting, or divorce, or the interet, or the deterioration of all our attention spans wrought by smartphones or all of the above, but long gone are the easy days of picking up a novel and just… reading it until it ends. Now I read in fragmented chunks of a chapter at breakfast, a few pages before passing out asleep, a few pages when I sit myself down and firmly insist I Am Going To Relax And Read.

Cue bringing Whistler on a six day canoe trip. Here, I thought, will be where I read. And for the first four days I had the same problem as at home, only here the distractions were the need to hang bags in trees to keep them from the bears or the pure exhaustion of having portaged for 75km. Until the fourth day when we were spoiled with only two hours of paddling and arrived at a site where I could hang my hammock and just… read. And guys, I read that book and was immersed in it and time disappeared and everything was bliss.

You knew there was going to be an Until.

Until the book itself failed me. Oh but it’s perfection in narration – story telling at its best with funny and full characters that make their truth known in small actions and perfect dialogue. A plot that understands its scope – girl reunites with long forgotten third step father and recalls and then explores a trauma they shared alongside revisiting and reinterpreting family dynamics and forging new ones – and executes with brilliant pacing. Terrific writing that is neither showy nor wasted.

*spoilers ahead

But then Patchette can’t seem to clinch it. Unwilling, I guess, to kill Eddie *which BY THE WAY the only time I stopped reading was to take a break to tend to the fire because I knew (or thought I knew) that Eddie was about to die and I couldn’t accept it and didn’t want to. Oh there’s an elegant and literary way of explaining this ending – the precision of knowing ‘when to stop,’ and the genius of exploiting the core theme that we are all writing our own stories, we are all deciding at any given moment what part of our story matters to ourselves and to others and what to do with the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and other people (I am not kidding, the theme here is brilliantly done and stays with you) but it felt like such a cop-out, like an unwilligness to give this reader what she yearned for: a big cathartic cry on a hammock overlooking an Alogonquin lake lol

Alas, I was left to imagine my own ending – and if I were in a book club that read a book we could talk about it. For now, maybe you tell me: what was it like to read this one? what did you make of the ending?

Yours in the temporary bliss of deep reading. And here’s hoping this sets the pattern by reminding me of the exquisite joy of being in a great book.

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August 10, 2025 · 12:51 am

The Emperor of Gladness: Such poetry in fast food

Ocean Vuong is a poet, and The Emperor of Gladness is a novel infused with poetry. Such beautiful writing. I was tempted to try to explain how beautiful, but the irony of poorly trying to explain poetic beautiful language was too great a risk. Suffice to say: gorgeous.

And such an odd little plot to have such beauty. The novel opens with our protagonist, Hai, perched on the edge of a bridge ready to jump. Saved instead by an old woman, Grazina, suffering from dementia and ready to be saved, herself, too. The rest of the book follows how they care for one another and try – often failing – to care for themselves and the people around them. Most memorable, I think, is the cast of characters at the fast food restaurant where Hai works – finding among the connection, reciprocity and care he’s been missing.

Of course in a book opening with a suicide attempt, much of the book is spent wondering if Hai will find a way back to stability – and how he will get there. And how Grazina will be allowed to live and die with any dignity. How any of his colleagues will find their way to their specific and relatable and earnest hopes – my favourite being starring in amateur women’s wrestling – along with the dignity of doing work that supports security. In a way I was reminded of Demon Copperfield in the way the novel holds up the failures of systems and structures – health care, justice, education, social services – and the way these failures are felt by individuals.

And so rather then believing in any system that you’ve been told you should trust, The Emperor of Gladness offers instead the fragile security of other people: flawed, ailing, constantly letting us down out of their own hurt and inadequacies – and yet better, ever better then the imagined farce that we can do any of it alone.

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July 19, 2024 · 12:47 am

James: Just excellent

I’d requested Percival Everett’s James from the library before my week of holiday, but it didn’t arrive on time. Oh well, I thought, it’ll take me a month of reading six pages at bedtime to get through it. Not so! The kind of book – the excellent, brilliant, unstoppably great – book that you hungrily read in snatched seconds before someone-needs-help-with-their-sunscreen or you-work-a-regular-job-and-have-to-do-that-job-and-that-job-is-not-regrettably-reading-this-excellent-book.

A rewriting of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (a story I know well because I had a record – a record! – recording of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn as a kid, and listened to that record until it was beyond scratched and no longer playable, but could still recite long stretches – and if this was the 80s answer to the exhaustive library of audiobooks R and L listen to I’m not sure who comes out the winner as That Was a Good Record. ANYWAY), but told from the perspective of Jim, Huck’s slave.

The early ‘adventure’ narrative of Jim attempting escape and Huck joining him while he tries to escape the inevitable violence of his father, continues with the set-piece adventure scenes you’d expect: near misses, narrow escapes, and confounding characters up to no good. All the while the book explicitly and implicitly explores how race means, how it matters and when and to who and what the literal and bodily consequences of racism and violence look like. And how utterly absurd – and crushingly consequential – slavery is as an idea and a practice.

Perhaps not more than race, but alongside it, James is a book about the significance – and here I mean importance and the quality of signifying or giving meaning – of writing, reading, naming, crafting, telling and hearing stories, speaking – and how you speak – and of representation. Scenes of James claiming his name, or the costs of keeping a pencil, or the risks of telling – or not telling – Huck of his family. All wrapped up in what power is made and held in those who own narrative in who they will write/tell about, when and how (in a way that is obvious in a book that is a retelling of the story from the perspective of the historically marginalized-dehumanized Jim into the protagonist, author and creator but is nevertheless threaded consistently and brilliantly throughout the book).

As I write this I worry you will think this is a dry, boring book that is meant to be taught in second year literature courses (it is definitely not dry or boring but will also almost certainly be – or already be – taught in second year literature courses). Not so – this one has plot pacing that moves, all the while dropping impeccable sentences that just hang with gut pulling perfection.

So stop reading this rambling but enthusiastic review and go get the book already.

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