B*tches in Bookshops: based on Jay Z and Kanye West’s “N*ggas in Paris”

Nerdy YouTube video! Bookshop rapping…

The Top 10 Books I Read This Year

I did a cumulative post about the books I have read this year in mid-November. However, I wanted to highlight my favourite reads of the bunch in fiction and non fiction. (Minus my client’s work, of course.) They did not all come out this year, but many did. Get a taste of my interests below!

My favourite fiction reads

ANNABEL by Kathleen Winter

This is literary Canadian fiction at its finest and it had a fantastic reception in the UK. From House of Anansi’s website: “In 1968, into the beautiful, spare environment of remote coastal Labrador, a mysterious child is born: a baby who appears to be neither fully boy nor girl, but both at once. Haunting, sweeping in scope, and stylistically reminiscent of Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex, Annabel is a compelling tale about one person’s struggle to discover the truth about their birth and self in a culture that shuns contradiction.” Twitter: @supremetronic

BIRDS OF PARADISE by Diana Abu-Jaber

After hearing about this book at BookExpo America in the spring I was eager for the rest of the reading community to catch up with my excitement. From Norton’s website: “In the tropical paradise that is Miami, Avis and Brian Muir are still haunted by the disappearance of their ineffably beautiful daughter, Felice, who ran away when she was thirteen. This multilayered novel about a family that comes apart at the seams-and finds its way together again-is totally involving and deeply satisfying, a glorious feast of a book.” Twitter: @dabujaber

NEVER LET ME GO by Kazuo Ishiguro

This book changed the way I think about fiction, especially speculative fiction, and the film adaptation was fantastic. I was late coming to this one, but I’m forever changed. From Random House: “From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Remains of the Day comes a devastating new novel of innocence, knowledge, and loss. As children Kathy, Ruth, and Tommy were students at Hailsham, an exclusive boarding school secluded in the English countryside. It was a place of mercurial cliques and mysterious rules where teachers were constantly reminding their charges of how special they were.”

STILTSVILLE by Susanna Daniel

This was my latest read and again, not sure why it took so long for me to get to it, but I love the way it made me think about family, unconditional love and the way love and life plays out over the decades. From HarperCollins: “Against a vivid South Florida background, Susanna Daniel’s Stiltsville offers a gripping, bittersweet portrait of a marriage—and a romance—that deepens over the course of three decades. Called “an elegantly crafted work of art and a great read” by Curtis Sittenfeld (American Wife, Prep) Stiltsville is a stunningly assured debut novel sure to appeal to readers of Anita Shreve, Sue Miller, and Annie Dillard, or anyone enchanted by the sultry magic of Miami.” Twitter: @susannadaniel

THE MARRIAGE PLOT by Jeffery Eugenidies

I am new to Eugenidies as this was the first book of his I read (he wrote THE VIRGIN SUICIDES and MIDDLESEX). It is one of the best books of 2011 in my opinion. From Random House: “The triangle in this amazing and delicious novel about a generation beginning to grow up is age old, and completely fresh and surprising. With devastating wit, irony and an abiding understanding and love for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides resuscitates the original energies of the novel while creating a story so contemporary that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives.”

Do you write down every book you read? I do!

Early 2010 I started writing down all the books I read. Partly to see how many books I read in a year–but also to remind myself in case I forget…

In the past year I have read–on top of all the reading I do for my clients and the submissions I read–41 books!

For those interested in what I read, because that’s what I’m looking for in the queries that come in, below is a list of my recent literary triumphs:

The Good Daughters

The Slap

The Birth House

The Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing

No and Me

Arrival City

The Postmistress

French Women Don’t Get Fat

Annabel

What Is Your Reading Diet Comprised Of?

The Atlantic interviewed Margaret Atwood last month to ask what she reads on an average day.

What is your reading diet comprised of? I read everything from literary to commercial fiction, practical nonfiction, cookbooks, literary journals, magazines, Twitter, newspapers, publishing blogs and online sources. On my nightstand is everything from Jane Costello to Ian McEwan to David Nicholls to Vogue. Not to mention queries, partials, fulls and client manuscripts in my inbox.

Some of my favourite recent (non client) reads are:

• Arrival City: The Final Migration and Our Next World by Doug Sanders, Globe and Mail columnist and great source on news in Europe. Find him here.
• Barefoot a tender summer romance from Elin Hilderbrand. Find her here.
• Let The Great World Spin a literary fiction masterpiece from award winner Colum McCann. His site is here.

Q: Do you take recommendations? Do you read lists? How do you balance your literary diet?

Margaret Atwood

Margaret Atwood:

When I wake up in the morning I might check my email to see what gruesome things have come in from Europe, but I won’t go to news sites. I don’t like news too early in the day. I would rather have it filter in gradually. I might go for a walk with a friend and purchase a paper newspaper, which is very nice to have in a cafe. Then I might go online later in the day and look at a couple of newspapers or other news outlets or follow links that people have sent me. I listen to the radio, but around six o’clock in the evening.

Literary Recipes: cooking like your favourite character

After doing my baking this long weekend I got to thinking about food in literature and after a quick search I found a number of poetic recipes to keep any literary foodie inspired. Ever wanted to cook like your favourite character or writer? Henry Perowne? John Steinbeck? Now you can…

Systematizing Your Reading Consumption: you can’t do it all and that’s okay

After listening to NPR this week, the Linda Holmes’ discussion You Can’t Possibly Read It All, So Stop Trying resonated with my consumptive reading style and had me thinking about its application to publishing.

She said:

“I had gone through and thought about the number of books you could conceivably read in a year, for example. And then if you extrapolate it out over your lifetime, how many can you reasonably read. And it got me thinking about how vast the world of books is and how small what you will ever take in actually is. And it becomes a sort of overwhelming thought when you realize that no matter how hard you try, no matter how smart you are, no matter how much you love to read, as I put it in the piece, statistically speaking, you’re going to die having missed almost everything.”