Category Archives: Prize Winner

January 9, 2026 · 2:18 am

Dream Count: Some parts are brilliant

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Dream Count has some spectacular sections (and you sense in there the corollary that there are some that just draaaag).

Following the interconnected lives of friends/relatives Chimaka, Zikora, Omelogor, and Kadiatou – Nigerian expats living in America (or Nigera but with some time in America) – the book explores their lives before/during/after the pandemic. How their romantic relationships, jobs, friends and family shape their sense of themselves and the possibilities for their lives – and certainly how access to money makes and limits choices. I found the section following Kadiatou utterly gripping, beautiful in its writing, heartbreaking and enraging. Honestly the whole book could have been her section as a short story and I’d have been just as happy. Plus a few of the descriptions Chimaka has of why she fell in love with the different lovers she has – and how much insecurity drove early decisions in her romantic life (and how she eventually discovers the essential value of loving yourself first and Boy Did That Resonate).

So while I loved Americanah and Half of a Yellow Sun – in the end I’m lukewarm on Dream Count. I’d tell you to get it, read Chimaka’s section then skip ahead for Kadiatou’s section and then call it a day.

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December 28, 2025 · 11:57 pm

Saving Time: Read it before the new year?

I came to Jenny Odell’s Saving Time after reading Teaching Where You Are with my team. Teaching Where You Are had arguments about slow pedagogy and the relentless pace of post-secondary work that I found a useful reminder both of colonial efforts to organize time for Productivity and Efficiency. Around the same time I heard Odell on a podcast and so picked up Saving Time.

It is – perhaps with purpose – a slow read. There’s a lot of referencing other things and then referencing of the text itself and a sort of spiralling of the ideas on top of one another. I came away though having a renewed understanding that the constant experience of fast- short- not-enough time that I live in is a consequence of capital and gender, and that my temporal existence is eased by my race and class and that time, too, can be weaponized in arguments of more efficiency, more productivity, who gets to ‘afford’ leisure and under whose time crush that leisure comes.

The idea that women experience the press of time differently wasn’t a new idea to me – I could haven’t passed first year women’s studies without an awareness of the free domestic and emotional labour extracted – but there was a fresh pierce to it in my current reading moment, even as I reflected on the privilege I hold paying for childcare when I need it.

Perhaps the freshest idea for me – and in some ways the most terrifying and comforting – was the reminder of the excess boundaries of planetary time that are not concerned with the whisper of a moment of my life – and certainly not whether I get the laundry folded today, or a report filed that no one was going to read anyway. And with that length the existential angst and terror of our unfolding climate catastrophe a reminder from Odell that the future is long, too, and we might still write parts of it.

So in a year when the argument of AI has been More, Faster, Efficient, More, Faster, Productivity – alongside the worrisome avoidance of any conversation about the environmental cost of doing so – I’d recommend Saving Time (and yes, read that both ways – both hoarding your time for later, and that it is time to save the planet) for your 2026 first read.

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November 8, 2025 · 3:45 pm

Curiosities: Delightful

So you have to trust me that it’s worth getting into Anne Flemming’s Curiosities. You’re going to start it and think ‘this reading old english-style spelling is too annoying’ or ‘the narrator as archivist is a bit of a gimmick’ but then! It’s going to be so great. You’ll get to romp through the plague, and arctic exploration/starvation, and witch trials, and romance – and you’re going to be rewarded with a fantastic love story OR WAIT fantastic love stories that offer the wide range of ways people love and are loved.

Past-Erin who geeked out endlessly historical fiction surfaced throughout reading Curiosities imagining what a fun addition this could be to any seminar on the genre for its playful engagement with the making of history. Read in that genre it does the usual work of acknowledging the limits of the historical record, the ways we have to interpret scraps to piece together a full picture, the way perspective of the writer limits what and how something is told (and who gets full voice).

Celebrated among reviewers for its exploration of sexual and gender identity, I found this part of the book a welcome inclusion but as a background to other questions about care, community, and – yes- curiosity.

So please – put aside your initial irritation at having to Really Focus on the reading (cough, clearly some self-reflection here) and enjoy.

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August 21, 2025 · 12:37 pm

Let Us Descend

I can’t place what I didn’t love about Jesmyn Ward’s Let Us Descend but it was something about an uncertainty of what would be/was the trajectory of Annis’s story. Which makes sense, I know, in a book of slavery and the experience of uncertainty and alienation for those enslaved. And maybe love of a book focused on the slave experience is the wrong aspiration – something closer to appreciation and awe for the brilliant writing, the evocative and rich descriptions, the pacing and poetry.

The novel focuses on Annis and her journey of enslavement from a time with her mother to a slave market to a sugar plantation and beyond. The physical journey is marked by spirits and hauntings that make manifest (or as manifest as a ghost can be) the intergenerational trauma of slavery and violence – and the ways resilience come from the stories we have been told and tell ourselves. I suppose my uncertainty about what the novel was going to be about (like it felt like I kept waiting for the plot to begin? or the core conflict to be made clear?) misunderstands that the story is one of survival – and that the meaningful trajectory of experiencing endless uncertainty of place, people and threatened and real violence – and when and how we can claim autonomy and community amid the most abject dehumanized moments – is itself the life of Annis and the plot we are meant to follow.

So in this instance I think the problem was me as a reader – expecting or wanting something different from the story – while the book itself is an expertly crafted, compact gem.

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