5 Great Books To Read In 2020 While Stuck At Home
Personally, I struggle with health anxiety, so sitting in front of a computer while there’s a global health emergency isn’t something I can do for a sustained period of time, without feeling the mental weight of the world coming crashing down. Luckily I’m also an avid reader and writer.
Because of the crisis, I’ve been spending every Sunday with no phone, no television, and no internet. The only things I have to occupy my time are Google Docs, exercise, and books.
And if you find yourself in a similar position to me, I’d like to suggest my 5 favourite novels I read in 2019, to be read in 2020!
Michael Redhill’s Bellevue Square
In late August of this year, I decided that I should, as a Canadian author, be more of a literary steward and indulge in great Canadian fiction. I googled “magical realism Canadian books 2019” and found a list of books to read, including Michael Redhill’s book, Bellevue Square, which was third on my list.
What I got was a pleasant surprise. It starts, “My doppelganger problems began one afternoon in early April,” and I was immediately hooked. From there, it’s a wild wild of what’s true, what’s not, and a first-hand account of what it’s like to lose your mind.
Michael Crummey’s The Innocents
This novel is the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon happening in real time, in that I had been thinking about characterization for the last month, but this is a novel built entirely on the power of two characters, Ada and Everett (Adam and Eve, if you didn’t catch it immediately.).
Read: How To Write Compelling Fictional Characters
The story is about two young children orphaned when they were nine and eleven, respectively. Their parents and little sister dying in short order, during a harsh winter, to some unnamed illness. They are left to fend for themselves on a coastal plot of land called “Orphan’s Cove” near Newfoundland. By some miracle, they survive the rest of the Winter until The Hope, the supply vessel that stocked the family every spring and fall, arrives.
Having learned some small sense of fishery from his Father, Evered convinces The Beadle to sell (Read: indenture) him equipment to get through the season, and he’ll pay the man back with the fish he catches during the summer.
The book continues from here, exploring the years that pass, as these two, estranged from the world, navigate the strange experience that is life, with no one to guide them.
Alix Ohlin’s Dual Citizens
Dual Citizens is an intimate look into the lives of two sisters, Lark and Robin, following them from childhood to motherhood, and told through the intimate perspective of the older sister, Lark.
The two of them grow up in Montreal, under the tutelage of an absent mother named Marianne, who is trying desperately to hold onto her own youth and importance, with no father-figure in sight. The two sisters soon depart across the border (Dual Citizens), to explore separate but irrevocably connected lives, and the novel unfolds as they journey through mid to late adulthood.
Ian Williams’ Reproduction
Ian Williams’ Reproduction, winner of the Canadian Giller Prize in 2019, is a story about unconventional family, and bonds through time, regardless of blood.
Williams absolutely plays around with a poetic touch in reproduction, playing with unfamiliar and not-often-explored forms, while intermingling cross-sectional racial tensions and a brand of multiculturalism only found in Canada.
There’s no doubt that Williams’ is an expert of forms and it’s a pleasure to experience him delve into a variety of different techniques.
Ian Canon’s It’s A Long Way Down
As the great Bilbo Baggins once said, “After all, why not, why shouldn’t I [share my own].
It’s A Long Way Down tells the story of David Emmeret Smith, a successful actor who, on the cusp of the biggest night of his life, acts on one impulsive decision after another, beginning a downward spiral that threatens everything he holds dear. What follows from this is a hedonist’s love affair with drugs, depravity and destruction and the realization that it wasn’t so far down after all.
“A good addict isn’t built overnight.
He isn’t built in a week, or two weeks, or a month.
An addict, much like a well-deserved discipline, a martial art, a painting, or a poem, takes time to build — and a fair bit of money — and David had as much of either of those as any junkie ever had.
However, within him still remained a last quality that, in order to be a full-fledged card carrying member of team tar, to wear, not his heart on his sleeve, but junk in his veins, had to be expunged: his pride.
A junkie’s pride — once the junk has embedded itself into the cellular structure, once it has forced itself into every nodule and nook and nether region, once it is a necessary part of the human biome, a cellular symbiosis, a partnership baked in the intertwining facets of pleasure and pain, when you would do anything, everything, for one more taste, one stretched dollar, a soul for a spoon, a prick for a prick — is always the last to go, the final stage in a metamorphosis that no man should undertake.
David, naive to the state of his body’s new chemical makeup, had to learn this the hard way. He had, as the proud do, decided that he wasn’t a man who bent the knee to any drug. He had to show himself that every decision he made was a conscious one, that he had a will of his own, was a man with agency.
But, sooner or later, pride leaves the body, and what is left is the junk and a man must come to terms with a solitary truth: knees were made to bend.”
Ian Canon is the author of It’s A Long Way Down (2018) and Before Oblivion (2017). His second novel What We Do On Weekends is forthcoming. His stories have been featured in The Creative Cafe, Montreal Writes, The Junction, The Sunlight Press, The Spadina Literary Review, Found Polaroids, and he’s been profiled for Vue.
