The end of the year is here and with it, our staff picks — and reading stats — have made their way to the blog. This year we wanted to add a sprinkle of data, and our findings are as fascinating as expected — BookNetters take their reading very seriously. Read on to learn our preferred reading formats and subjects, how many books our most avid reader read, and which were our favourite books of the year. All our recommendations can be found in this CataList catalogue.
BookNet Reads
The BookNet staff read a total of 368 books.
44% were print books, 36% ebooks, and 20% audiobooks.
21% were by Canadian authors.
63% were Fiction, 47% were Non-Fiction.
75% were borrowed from a public library.
We also learned that
170 books were purchased by BookNet staff — 90 of them by one BookNetter alone!
The BookNetter who read the most read 106 books in 2021 — and currently has 5 more on the go!
And there’s more
One BookNetter only read Fiction
One only read Non-Fiction
One only read print books
One only read ebooks
Now onto a sampling of the books we read and loved in 2021:
Non-Fiction
A Promised Land by Barack Obama
In the stirring, highly anticipated first volume of his presidential memoirs, Barack Obama tells the story of his improbable odyssey from young man searching for his identity to leader of the free world, describing in strikingly personal detail both his political education and the landmark moments of the first term of his historic presidency — a time of dramatic transformation and turmoil.
Recommended by Lauren Stewart
Bisa Butler: Portraits contributions by Bisa Butler, Jordan Carter, Isabella Ko, and Michele Wije
Bisa Butler (b. 1973) is an American artist who creates arresting and psychologically nuanced portraits composed entirely of vibrantly coloured and patterned fabrics that she cuts, layers, and stitches together. Often depicting scenes from African American life and history, Butler invites viewers to invest in the lives of the people she represents while simultaneously expanding art-historical narratives about American quiltmaking. Situating her interdisciplinary work within the broader history of textiles, photography, and contemporary art, contributions by a group of scholars — and entries by the artist herself — illuminate Butler’s approach to colour, use of African-print fabrics, and wide-ranging sources of inspiration. Offering an in-depth exploration of one of America's most innovative contemporary artists, this volume will serve as a primary resource that both introduces Butler’s work and establishes a scholarly foundation for future research.
Recommended by Lauren Stewart
Can't Even by Anne Helen Petersen
Can’t Even goes beyond the original article, as Petersen examines how millennials have arrived at this point of burnout (think: unchecked capitalism and changing labour laws) and examines the phenomenon through a variety of lenses — including how burnout affects the way we work, parent, and socialize — describing its resonance in alarming familiarity. Utilizing a combination of sociohistorical framework, original interviews, and detailed analysis, Can’t Even offers a galvanizing, intimate, and ultimately redemptive look at the lives of this much-maligned generation, and will be required reading for both millennials and the parents and employers trying to understand them.
Recommended by Lauren Stewart
Don't Call It a Cult by Sarah Berman 🍁
Sex trafficking. Self-help coaching. Forced labour. Mentorship. Multi-level marketing. Gaslighting. Investigative journalist Sarah Berman explores the shocking practices of NXIVM, an organization run by Keith Raniere and his high-profile enablers (Seagram heir Clare Bronfman; Smallville actor Allison Mack; Battlestar Galactica actor Nicki Clyne). In her deeply researched account, Berman unravels how young women seeking creative coaching and networking opportunities found themselves blackmailed, literally branded, near-starved, and enslaved. With the help of the Bronfman fortune, Raniere built a wall of silence around these abuses, leveraging the legal system to go after enemies and whistleblowers.
Recommended by Lauren Stewart
Helgoland: Making Sense of the Quantum Revolution by Carlo Rovelli, translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell and The Science of Can and Can't by Chiara Marletto
Anyone who enjoys business or self-help books might enjoy these books as they look at fundamentals with a weather eye for understanding their underlying reality. The audiobook versions are very well done but access to the text can help. — Tom Richardson
I Hope This Finds You Well by Kate Baer and What Kind of Woman by Kate Baer
My interest in poetry on Instagram is well-documented, and I loved both of these recent titles from Kate Baer this year, particularly the project of I Hope This Finds You Well, where the author created erasure poems from the harassing, unfriendly direct messages in her inbox. For all those who loved Vivek Shraya (an on and off Instagram sensation) and Ness Lee’s Death Threat from a few years ago, you might enjoy this one! I’m really looking forward to Shraya’s People Change, too! — Monique Mongeon
Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio by Derf Backderf
The best graphic Non-Fiction I read this year is the moving, well-researched analysis of the people and events that led up to the death of four students at Kent State on May 4, 1970. Using local news clippings, written histories of the period, as well as unsealed government records and tapes from the Nixon era, Backderf tells the story with extensive sources cited in the notes that correct and update the story. The power though is the way that he weaves together the stories of the students who died that day, and the stories and personal biographies of the decision-makers at all levels of government. Truly excellent. — Jackie Fry
My Conversations With Canadians by Lee Maracle 🍁
On her first book tour at the age of 26, Lee Maracle was asked a question from the audience, one she couldn’t possibly answer at that moment. But she has been thinking about it ever since. As time has passed, she has been asked countless similar questions, all of them too big to answer, but not too large to contemplate. These questions, which touch upon subjects such as citizenship, segregation, labour, law, prejudice, and reconciliation (to name a few), are the heart of My Conversations with Canadians.
Recommended by Lauren Stewart
My Jewish Year by Abigail Pogrebin
A memoir with intensive research, interviews with leaders, and observations and reflections about following and observing all of the holidays and fasts on the Hebrew calendar for a year (and not being observant). — Shim Hirchberg Pleskin
My Mother's Daughter by Perdita Felicien 🍁
Decades before Perdita Felicien became a World Champion hurdler running the biggest race of her life at the 2004 Olympics, she carried more than a nation’s hopes: she carried her mother’s dreams.
Recommended by Lauren Stewart
NISHGA by Jordan Abel 🍁
I read a work of decolonization by poet and autobiographer, artist and academic Jordan Abel. In this multimedia work, Abel is grappling with the legacy of the residential school system on him and his family. In the past few years, he gave several talks across Canada in which he talked about urban indigeneity, and displacement from his traditional lands, culture, language, and knowledge of the Nisga’a whose traditional territories are in the Nass Valley of B.C. These talks form a prose poem structure around which the book’s form is constructed. These are interspersed with descriptions and depictions of his multimedia project called Empty Spaces. Taking the settler term “Terra Nullius” and reclaiming it through art, and informed by the cultural appropriation and texts of Marius Barbeau, he takes the nature descriptions of James Fennimore Cooper and overlays them with the various animal representations from First Nations art. Profound, moving, and a must read. Would love to see an installation of Empty Spaces. Content warnings for trauma. — Jackie Fry
Rez Rules by Chief Clarence Louie 🍁
Rez Rules is the first book written by Chief Clarence Louie, who has been the leader of the Osoyoos Indian Band in British Columbia for close to forty years. Credited with the economic revitalization of the Osoyoos reserve, Chief Louie is an internationally recognized leader and advocate for the independent economic development of First Nations communities. His writing is direct and passionate, with a quick and easy sense of humour. Rez Rules is not a memoir, but a blueprint for the future of First Nations communities and a direct and passionate treatise on leadership. — Hannah Johnston
The Face: A Time Code by Ruth Ozeki 🍁
What did your face look like before your parents were born? In The Face: A Time Code, bestselling author and Zen Buddhist priest Ruth Ozeki recounts, in moment-to-moment detail, a profound encounter with memory and the mirror. According to ancient Zen tradition, “your face before your parents were born” is your true face. Who are you? What is your true self? What is your identity before or beyond the dualistic distinctions, like father/mother and good/evil, that define us?
Recommended by Aline Zara
The Moth and the Mountain by Ed Caesar
The ongoing pandemic has really curtailed any plans to travel so I’ve been turning to more and more travel/adventure/history to satiate my wanderlust. While I’m unlikely to “fly a plane from England to Everest, crash-land on its lower slopes, then become the first person to reach its summit — all utterly alone" I sure enjoyed reading about someone who tried. Follow along with Maurice Wilson as he attempts to heal himself after the horrors of WWI with an adventure for the ages. — Noah Genner
The Secret Life of Groceries by Benjamin Lorr
If the words “supply chain” don’t cause you to recoil in fear after the year we’ve had, you might like this fascinating exploration of the hidden world behind our everyday supermarket. Passages are at turns absolutely horrifying and oddly fascinating, and what could have been a dry topic reads like a thriller. You’ll finish it faster than you expect!
Shoutout to fellow BookNetter Lauren for the recommendation! — Monique Mongeon
The Yellow House by Sarah M. Broom
A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom’s The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America’s most mythologized cities. This is the story of a mother’s struggle against a house's entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina. The Yellow House expands the map of New Orleans to include the stories of its lesser known natives, guided deftly by one of its native daughters, to demonstrate how enduring drives of clan, pride, and familial love resist and defy erasure. Located in the gap between the “Big Easy” of tourist guides and the New Orleans in which Broom was raised, The Yellow House is a brilliant memoir of place, class, race, the seeping rot of inequality, and the internalized shame that often follows. It is a transformative, deeply moving story from an unparalleled new voice of startling clarity, authority, and power.
Recommended by Lauren Stewart
Unravelling Canada by Sylvia Olsen 🍁
We have a lot of crafters on the BookNet team — there have been a few staff-organized craft lunches on Google Meet through the pandemic! I originally picked up this book thinking of it for my mother — a knitting wizard — but found myself getting pulled into reading these short vignettes from and about the knitters that Sylvia Olsen meets on her cross-country knitting store tour. Interspersed between the events, Sylvia muses about the history of the Cowichan sweaters that represent the history of her family’s business, and how knitting techniques are shared and adapted across places and people. She touches on questions of appropriation and respect and, as she travels across the country, on the things that knit us together as Canadians. — Carol Gordon
Why I Am Not a Buddhist by Evan Thompson 🍁
I balanced my interest in the self-help movement this past year, following the thread from Emerson and Thoreau up to the modern coaching phenomenon, with my continued focus on Buddhist philosophy. One book I found fascinating outside of the more technical reading was Why I Am Not a Buddhist by University of British Columbia philosophy professor, Evan Thompson. Evan lived a privileged childhood exposed to some of the most cutting edge, counter cultural philosophers at Lindisfarne Association where he was homeschooled. Why I Am Not a Buddhist is a critique of how Evan sees Buddhism represented in the west as some kind of exceptionalism, a science rather than theology. However much Why I Am Not a Buddhist will cause debate in the Buddhist world, Thompson's book is not an 'attack' on Buddhism the way Bertrand Russell's Why I Am Not a Christian was an attack on the core of Christianity but more a critique of the way Buddhism has been presented in the West. — Tim Middleton
Work Clean by Dan Charnas
A Non-Fiction guide on efficient systems and workflows using the French culinary term that means “putting in place” and re-creating the principles for the office and other settings. Literally the only book I’ve finished and then started re-reading from the beginning. — Shim Hirchberg Pleskin
Fiction
A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende, translated by Nick Caistor and Amanda Hopkinson
I remember falling in love with Isabel Allende’s writing when I read El Cuaderno de Maya (Maya’s Notebook) many years ago, picking up Largo Petalo de Mar (A Long Petal of the Sea) felt like something I needed to do, and my instincts were right. What a great story. Isabel takes the reader on a journey filled with love stories, chaos, sadness, and all the other not-so-easy-to-put-into-words feelings that come from leaving home to fight for a better future. — Nataly Alarcon
At Night All Blood is Black by David Diop
Winner of the 2021 International Booker Prize for Fiction. Such an amazing work talking about the Senegalese soldiers who fought for the French in World War I. A story never told before, an extraordinary work of literature. Best to just go into it blind and immerse yourself in the voice and gifts of this amazing storyteller. Content warnings for depictions of war violence. — Jackie Fry
Autopsy of a Boring Wife by Marie-Renée Lavoie 🍁, translated by Arielle Aaronson 🍁
I knew from the title alone this one was going to hit my funny bone in just the right way. Humorous and heartfelt, we follow our protagonist as she struggles her way out of the narrow view that her husband and society have of her middle-aged life, and remembers how to dance to the beat of her own drum. — Carol Gordon
Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis 🍁
André Alexis's contemporary take on the apologue offers an utterly compelling and affecting look at the beauty and perils of human consciousness. By turns meditative and devastating, charming and strange, Fifteen Dogs shows you can teach an old genre new tricks.
Recommended by Aline Zara
Hench by Natalie Zina Walschots 🍁
Are “bad guys” just a matter of perspective? This inventive novel is told from the point of view of a henchperson working for the villain. The premise reminded me of the dedication in Terry Pratchett’s Guards! Guards!: “They may be called the Palace Guard, the City Guard, or the Patrol. Whatever the name, their purpose in any work of heroic fantasy is identical: it is, round about Chapter Three (or ten minutes into the film) to rush into the room, attack the hero one at a time, and be slaughtered. No one ever asks them if they want to.” This book asks that question and lots of other interesting ones about the people who are always there, but never noticed. It’s a fun read that propels you along. — Ainsley Sparkes
Jonny Appleseed by Joshua Whitehead 🍁
"You're gonna need a rock and a whole lotta medicine" is a mantra that Jonny Appleseed, a young Two-Spirit/Indigiqueer, repeats to himself in this vivid and utterly compelling debut novel by poet Joshua Whitehead.
Off the reserve and trying to find ways to live and love in the big city, Jonny becomes a cybersex worker who fetishizes himself in order to make a living. Self-ordained as an NDN glitter princess, Jonny has one week before he must return to the "rez" — and his former life — to attend the funeral of his stepfather. The seven days that follow are like a fevered dream: stories of love, trauma, sex, kinship, ambition, and the heartbreaking recollection of his beloved kokum (grandmother). Jonny's life is a series of breakages, appendages, and linkages — and as he goes through the motions of preparing to return home, he learns how to put together the pieces of his life.
Jonny Appleseed is a unique, shattering vision of First Nations life, full of grit, glitter, and dreams.
Recommended by Lauren Stewart
Leonard Cohen by Philippe Girard 🍁, translated by Helge Dascher
I must admit that I haven’t read this one yet, but I do have it on order and expect to read it before the end of 2021. The illustrations by Philip Girard look beautiful and I’m a sucker for a little Leonard Cohen magic. Waiting with anticipation! — Noah Genner
Master of the Revels by Nicole Galland
So many Fiction genres — historical, contemporary, science, fantasy, with witches and magic, time travel, and lots of Shakespeare this time around. A delight, even when crying. The second book, hopefully not the last, in the world of D.O.D.O. (the first book, The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O., was co-written with Neal Stephenson). A solid sequel. — Shim Hirchberg Pleskin
The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo and When the Tiger Came Down the Mountain by Nghi Vo
These novellas by Nghi Vo were two of the most original and gripping works of fantasy I read last year. Focusing on political machinations in an empire inspired by Imperial China, Vo’s writing style is pared back and elegant, and the mythos she builds is reminiscent of a contemporary fairytale. If you’re looking for feminist high fantasy, check these out! — Hannah Johnston
What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad 🍁
The 2021 Scotiabank Giller Prize winner is definitely worth all the praises that have been bestowed on it this year. A timely topic conveyed unforgettably by Omar El Akkad. A tense but beautiful story of survival and adventure. — Noah Genner
Juvenile and Young Adult
Can I Be Your Dog? by Troy Cummings
A picture book of Arfy, the lonely dog, mailing “handwritten” letters to prospective owners. (Spoiler alert, it’s very sad but then there’s a happy ending as he gets adopted and it is the cutest.) — Shim Hirchberg Pleskin
Lightfall: The Girl & the Galdurian by Tim Probert, illus. by Tim Probert
For fans of Amulet and middle grade readers who love sweeping worlds like Star Wars, the first book of the Lightfall series introduces Bea and Cad, two unlikely friends who get swept up in an epic quest to save their world from falling into eternal darkness.
Recommended by Mickey Fontana
Nevermoore series by Jessica Townsend
I didn’t think I’d be this into a middle-grade series, but the description of the first book intrigued me and by the time I was a couple chapters in, I was hooked. I suppose I am a sucker for an unremarkable child being pulled into a magical setting, having to compete in magical trials, and discovering their true potential. So perhaps it’s not surprising that I immediately listened to the next two and now am bereft that I have to wait until Fall 2022 for the fourth. I listened to the audiobooks of all three and I would highly recommend them. Gemma Whelan might be my favourite ever audiobook narrator! — Ainsley Sparkes
A deep dive into book prices in Canada from our upcoming Canadian Book Consumer Study 2023.