The Longest List of Recommendations Ever
I read 40 books this year. Here are my favourites from 2023 (spoiler - my absolute favourite was "Unearthing") and my round-up of favourite things from this week.
It’s been unusually cold and snowy in Vancouver this week and I haven’t felt brave enough to venture outside. Instead I’ve been cooking - alternating between listening and watching Samin Nosrat and Sohla el-Waylly whiz around in their kitchens and cooking in my own, making creamy kheer, Korean vegetable pancakes, hearty soups and silky, luscious pastas with sundried tomatoes and mushrooms.
It’s hibernating indoors weather. The kind of weather that makes you want to curl up with a book or a good movie. So in this newsletter, I share my favourite things that I’ve been reading, listening and watching this week. Below the paywall, I share my favourite reads from 2023.
My Favourite Things This Week
To Read
Articles
The Work of the Witness by Sarah Aziza (Jewish Currents Magazine). 100 days in to the atrocities in Gaza, we have been watching and sharing and donating and calling and protesting and boycotting and things are only getting worse. This reflection from Sarah Aziza is a must-read reflection on what it means to witness and to bear account. She writes:
"Perhaps the fundamental work of witness is the act of faith—an ethical and imaginative leap beyond what we can see. It is a sober reverence of, and a commitment to fight for, the always-unknowable other. This commitment does not require constant stoking by grisly, tragic reports. Rather than a feeling, witness is a position. It insists on embodiment, on sacrifice, mourning and resisting what is seen. The world after genocide must not, cannot, be the same. The witness is the one who holds the line of reality, identifying and refusing the lie of normalcy. Broken by what we see, we become rupture incarnate."
The article in its entirety is linked above.
You Will Not Kill Our Imaginations by Saeed Teebi (The New Quarterly)
My favourite book of 2022 was Saeed Teebi’s short story collection “Her First Palestinian”. In this article for The New Quarterly, Saeed Teebi reflects on the importance of keeping imagination alive asking:
“We must feel free — and, if necessary, will ourselves to feel free — to critique the world of injustice and inhumanity that we despise, and envision in its place the world we want. If we can’t be free in our own imaginations, where can we be free?”
Books
Things I Don’t Want to Know by Deborah Levy
A few years ago I met Sarah Polley at an event for her book “Run Towards the Danger” and she suggested I read Deborah Levy’s three part memoir. It’s taken me until now to follow that advice. This is the first book and it is a response to Orwell’s essay “Why I write”. It’s about Levy’s experiences travelling on her own, being a child in South Africa where her father was taken and imprisoned by the apartheid government and about her longing in her teenage years to be a writer.
The Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa
Days at the Morisaki Bookshop is a wonderful book that begins with our protagonist Takako being told by her boyfriend Hideaki after three years of dating that he is getting married. This is a confusing announcement because she was sure that they were dating exclusively. It turns out they weren’t, and this realization results in her leaving her job and falling into a deep depression. Things change for her when she moves in with her uncle Satoru stay to live and work at his bookshop. While there she discovers a love of reading, regains her confidence, and grows stronger. It is a cute, delightful story that will not take you longer than an evening to read.
To Watch
South Africa’s Case at the International Court of Justice
It is strange to put this case on a “favourites list” but there is other way to say this - South Africa’s case at the International Court of Justice is history in the making, and a profoundly important watch.
Moonstruck
I saw a clip with Dan Levy this week where he said that his favourite movie was the 1987 film Moonstruck and so I looked it up. Starring Cher and Nicholas Cage, this film won Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Director, Best Supporting Actress, Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards in 1988 (in total it won 6 Oscars) and I loved it wholeheartedly. It’s warm, joyous and very funny.
The Book of Clarence (in theatres now)
Set in A.D 33, this film imagines a story revolving around Clarence, the twin brother of Thomas who wants to be someone in the world, and feels the weight of constantly being told he is a nobody. Along the way, it tells a story about colonialism, power, and striving for justice. This film opens on a crucifixation scene and can be tough to watch in spots but I found it original and really well-done overall.
Hearts Beat Louder (Streaming on Kanopy)
I cancelled my streaming subscriptions in December, and I’ve been using Kanopy, a streaming site available through many public library systems to watch movies instead. This is a relaxed Friday night watch - it’s a story about a father and a daughter the summer before she leaves for college and their experiences making music together in a time of transition and goodbyes.
To Listen
I recently read the brilliant book “On the Island of Missing Trees” by Elif Shafak (more about this book in an upcoming newsletter!) and it left me emotional, humbled and wanting to learn more about the author. My takeaway from this episode was Shafak’s reflections that it is to our detriment when we only read literature in one language. When we never seek out translations, we miss out on experiencing forms of storytelling that are different from our own, and we are poorer for it.
I admit, my own reading list this year featured only a few translated works. Overall, I read 40 books this year, 21 nonfiction and 19 fiction reads. Under the paywall, I share some of my reading statistics and more about my favourites.