Closing out what was clearly a fantastic reading year for me. If we're being honest, probably a year where I escaped more than I should have into books while the rest of the world (and sometimes myself) felt like such a mess. But at least they were really good books, and at least they made me feel all sorts of ways!
And hey, I finally made an index post for these!
Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton
Oof. This is such a good and difficult book. It pulls off the feat of being Important from a social perspective while still being deeply personal and intimate. Beaton is so good at chronicling, in this slow, dreadful, monotonous way, this time in her life; laying out the multifaceted toxicity and exploitation of the oils sands project: The environmental devastation, the trampling of indigenous rights and welfare, the social devastation of the isolation and lack of support for the workers there that hurts and brings out the worst in the (mostly) men who migrate to Alberta seeking opportunity. There’s so much that’s personal about this book, so much careful craft that went into it, such grace in the way that Beaton turns her eyes to these structural problems that led to events that caused her such personal harms. It’s a marvel.
I Am Of Two Hearts by Val Wise
This is a lovely, strange, understated work about an ambassador stopping over at a temple on a border on a return journey that, at the end of, he expects to be executed. It’s very liminal - there’s lots of betweens and layers and withins to it - between nations, between loyalties, between the temporal and the divine, between life and death, the complications of bodies and genders and what home and homeland mean. It’s all very suggestive and evocative rather than heavy-handed.
Wise’s clean, expressive style is in full effect (there’s a bit of uncanniness to seeing gestures that I associate with Cheer Up! in the other context) and is supplemented by some striking collage-work later on in the story.
Other Ever Afters by Melanie Gillman
Fairy tales for kids who wander off the path and get lost on purpose. The stories are aggressively, delightfully queer, not just in the heartwarming romantic sense (though there’s lots of that!) but with the full political and social valence of queerness. I always love the softness of Gillman’s style, and the way they change up the palette of coloured pencils they’re using for each story gives them each this really cool, distinct feel. There’s some spookiness to them, but they’re all-ages and generally much more on the heartwarming rather than horrific side of things.
Apsara Engine by Bishakh Som
A late entry. This is an odd short story collection, where most of the stories are about well-off women in their 30s and 40s having a vague sense longing that can't be fully expressed and bleeds out in all these weird, uncanny ways. They’re beautifully done and sad and strange, but there's a sort of obtuse hollowness to them.
And then there’s this one story towards the end (and it was unsurprising to find out that it’s the last one she wrote, and the only one she wrote fully after coming out) that says the quiet part out loud, that puts a name to what's been missing and literally draws a map to it, and it’s one of the most sublime and moving things I’ve ever read. It literally floored me in the sense that it left me laying on the floor sobbing.
It underlines this queer, trans, diasporic longing for a home and a place in community that maybe didn't exist. It's something like nostalgia, but facing forward. Something that we carry the potentiality for in our own bodies and that we can work to build together. As I’ve been thinking back on what I read in the year and doing this writing, it’s struck me that so many of the most resonant moments - in Villette, Manhunt, Wet Moon and so many of the others - have been about loneliness and this yearning for connection, community, intimacy, and, in that sense, Apsara Engine made for a tremendously fitting capstone to the year.