books in black wooden book shelf

In years past, I have tried not to give myself reading goals. They felt more like a burden than a form of encouragement. However, this year, I am getting back on that horse, and I’ve decided to aim for reading 40 books.

I’ve made a considerable dent already — in January, I read six. That’s 15% of my goal! So here are some short thoughts about each one.

Consider the Fork: A History of How We Cook and Eat by Bee Wilson

Food history has always been one of my favourite niche topics, and Consider the Fork is a fun part of my mental collection. Each chapter covers a concept or cooking technique, looking at how material and cultural conditions have changed our cooking practices over time. If you’ve wondered about how geography and culture affect things as varied as cooking utensils and table manners, then this is a decent one to read.

However, near the end I was pushing myself to finish the final chapters and get it done before it was due back at the library. By the end, I was more relieved to have finished it on time. I didn’t have much time to savour the information.

The Restaurant of Lost Recipes by Hisashi Kashiwai, translated by Jesse Kirkwood

Although I’m familiar with the genre of “cozy Japanese fiction”, this was my first time reading a book within it. It turns out that this is the second in a series of books, but luckily, the novel is low-stakes enough that this doesn’t pose an issue.

What I most noticed when reading The Restaurant of Lost Recipes is how its episodic nature becomes predictable very quickly. Each chapter opens with some person in crisis. While the crisis may vary — an impending marriage, a faded career, grief — their motivations for coming to the title restaurant are the same: they want the owners to replicate a meal or a recipe last eaten long ago in the hopes that it will provide them with closure or guidance on what to do next. The owners, a father and daughter team, then provide their guests a delicious meal, ask questions about the lost recipe, then promise to figure out the truth.

The actual recipe sleuthing happens off-screen. We then jump to weeks later when the supplicant returns, where invariably the father serves the lost meal correctly, explains exactly how he found the secret ingredient or technique, then sends them gratefully on their way, recipe in hand. The father and daughter then reminisce about their family and enjoy the same meal, often in front of the shrine of the mother of the family, who died years ago.

The appeal of the book is obvious — you get to read descriptions of delicious meals, and get the vicarious enjoyment of people healing from some sort of emotional trauma. In times like these, those results are especially comforting. However, by the end, it all felt ho-hum. The beat-by-beat nature of the chapters becomes obvious very fast, and beyond the descriptions of the meals themselves, the prose is plain and utilitarian.

Leech by Hiron Ennes

I was first introduced to Ennes’ work last year when I read their short story “The Breath of Kannask” in the anthology Northern Nights. The crystalline quality of the prose, and the strangeness of the setting, were so captivating that I knew I had to read Leech at some point. So when a friend gave it to me as a Christmas gift, I was ecstatic.

However, I decided not to read it right away. A brooding, post-apocalyptic body horror novel with gothic elements did not feel like the appropriate book with which to cap off my 2024 or start my 2025. It felt too portentous and dark.

So I waited until the other books listed above built me a little buffer first. And then I dove straight into this glorious, blood-slicked mess of a story. This book’s got everything: parasite-induced hive minds; a crumbling, gothic mansion in a remote arctic wasteland; mutants and cyborgs that speak in thick Quebecois accents; a gross, decaying patriarch with an iron grip on his family; creepy twins; a childbirth scene; and more gore than you can shake a stick at. The exquisite grammatical tango of constantly switching between a collective first-person narrator and an individual first-person one — both of which use “I” — without any loss of clarity is just icing on the cake.

I read the whole thing in about 36 hours. And while Leech is most likely a standalone, I look forward to reading whatever else Ennes publishes.

Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman

While Leech might boast the most visceral, indelible images of all the books I read this month, Dungeon Crawler Carl takes the cake for being out-and-out the most fun one of the bunch.

This book is so high concept that I’m not even going to try summarizing the opening and inciting incident, but imagine crossing the planetary destruction of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with the fighting-for-your-life-corporate-dystopia of The Hunger Games and the setting of Dungeons and Dragons. It’s funny and fan-service-y as hell, and I am looking very forward to continuing the series. I’ll probably read the second book in March.

Winter: Five Windows on the Season by Adam Gopnik

There was a huge cold snap in southern Ontario a few weeks ago, where things went as low as -30°C with the windchill. And I’m a sucker for finding the “right” time to read a specific book. So what time is better for a book about winter than during the coldest fucking week of the year?

Winter was Adam Gopnik’s contribution to the Massey Lectures, and each chapter/lecture covers a different aspect of the season, ranging from the development of the Romantic idea of winter as a time of beauty and sweetness, to the secularization of Christmas, to the origins of hockey. His research is wide-ranging, and, unsurprisingly for a contributor to The New Yorker, full of references to touchstones of “classic” or “canonical” European/North American literature, art, and music. Many of these were ones that I had never heard of before, like the Winterreise song cycle, the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, and the poetry of François Villon. His easy familiarity with these things made me feel like an uncultured oaf.

However, I was surprised by the book’s lack of depth in other ways. The final chapter is about the idea of “remembering” winter, which heavily implies that winter is either becoming less harsh or disappearing altogether because of climate change. Yet discussions of climate change take up, at most, only three pages. This, to me, feels like an astonishing oversight.

A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf

This book’s reputation precedes itself; I am happy to report that it’s just as striking and empathetic and infuriating as I’ve been led to believe. Looking back with the benefit of almost a century of feminist endeavour between then and now, what strikes me is how Woolf clearly recognizes and articulates certain concepts, even if she didn’t have the specific terminology we do now, such as misogyny, the Bechdel test, and the general paucity of historical research into the everyday lives of women. Plus, she recognizes that trans lives matter and that fascist art is inherently futile and soulless.

Mrs. Dalloway celebrates its centennial this May. After having tried to read it in high school and failed, I think the time is now ripe to attempt it again. Wish me luck in a few months’ time.

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