Mind Picking : Farewell 2021 (And once again: Good Riddance!)

 

I gave the above candle to Dave on his birthday at the end of December because it pretty much sums up the year for us (and as Dave noted when he opened it with delight, discovering and binge-watching Schitt's Creek was one of 2021's few highlights). 2021 began with another year of COVID lockdowns — hard on everyone but particularly frustrating for us as we tried to take care of Dave's parents' mounting health crises — and while I was grateful for time off work that let me spend my days with Dave's Dad as he increasingly couldn't take care of himself on his own, nothing about this year felt like a vacation or a reset; 2021, more than anything, feels like a lost year. As noted here before, Dave's Mom passed away in May, his Dad just eight weeks later, and although we had a very small interment ceremony for the pair of them at the beginning of August, Dave feels really bad that restrictions haven't loosened up enough, at the right time, for us to have held a celebration of life with more of their friends and family in attendance. I know that they would understand the delay, but Bev and Jim do deserve so much more than we've been able to provide so far. Here's to getting it right in 2022.

The absolute highlight of the year was Kennedy and Zach's wedding in September up at Sauble Beach (and we will be forever grateful that we were able to get that property back into family hands, and that Dave's parents would be aware of that fact, before they passed away). I was happy for Mallory that she decided to go back to school, and while I miss having her around, I know it's good for her to be independent and live in her new apartment with her friends. The only other real event of note was my thyroid surgery in October, but I've already written all I want to about that for now. No trips this year; no concerts or theatre; not even an extra number of books read despite the lockdown: 2021 was a Schitt show.

This was a year that saw me wanting to burn down everything that had recently been giving my life meaning. The gym was closed for the first half of 2021, and as numbers were tightly controlled when it did reopen, they introduced a prebooking app, with the understanding that if you don't give two hours notice before cancelling a booking, you'd be charged a $15 fee. When my father-in-law passed so quickly one evening at his hospice, I didn't think to cancel my gym booking for the next morning — and when I woke too exhausted to attend and only gave one hour notice, I was disgusted to have then been charged the $15 (which is not much money but underlined the fact to me that they are a business and not the "family" that the coaches are encouraged to present themselves as; that's a pretty petty money grab when the 6:45 a.m. class is never even half full.) Only my sister-in-law's desire to keep going every morning stopped me from rage-quitting.

I was also getting tired of the Zoom meetings for book club — this year did not feel like it was providing the same degree of interpersonal connection, and when only two others bothered to read my pick for October (The Only Good Indians — an Indigenous Horror that I thought would be perfect for Halloween and for helping us as Canadians on our path to Truth and Reconciliation), I was truly offended. I haven't attended another meeting since, which I don't even know if anyone has noticed, and I don't know if I'll go back.

And I was also pretty annoyed at work (despite the managers having been very understanding throughout the year about the time off I needed for end-of-life care, the wedding, and the surgery) when I felt like I was overscheduled in December; too many closing shifts, too many days in a row without time off. My old manager retired in October, and it might be a matter of the new manager needing to better learn the scheduling system, but there was a definite air of disgruntlement throughout the store in the lead-up to Christmas. And when my schedule had me working eight days in a row, I could have rage-quit the second I saw it. But then I recognised the pressure that the managers themselves were under, and while I wasn't going to actually come out and complain about it, one joke said in the presence of a manager ("Stop asking if I'm back in tomorrow — I'm in for eight days in a row, which isn't 'technically illegal', so I'll be here") was enough for her to ask me if I wanted the 22nd or the 23rd off as she would be happy to cover me. I was a bit chastened by the offer, tried to refuse it, but she insisted as it was the "right thing to do" and I gratefully took the 23rd (which actually gave me three days off in a row at Christmas, changing me from the worst schedule in the store to the best; I am certain there are resentments pointed at me about this; everyone is exhausted right now). Even my own manager apologised to me for the rotten schedule, thanked me for my understanding, and looked like she was about to cry as she opened her arms to give me a hug. How could I rage-quit that? Ultimately, it's the connections that I've made with my co-workers — and the opportunities that the job has given me to display competence — that keeps me coming back; I have no reason to quit if I'm still feeling fulfilled in these ways.

Like I said above, I read a relatively low number of books in 2021, and that can be tied to this year's lockdowns and losses: When Mallory and I were here together for months, I didn't want to be constantly ignoring her for books. And when I was needed to sit with my father-in-law throughout the day as he declined, I wasn't going to bring a book with me and not act like I was just there for a visit. Dave and I spent most of May and all of September up at Sauble Beach, but we were busy with projects throughout our days and I couldn't ignore him for books when we were done our work. Even the last book I read this year (The Dawn of Everything) took nearly a month to get through because I was so exhausted from work (which, I want to note, hadn't been the case through "Christmas in retail" in earlier years), so this, overall, felt like a year without reading (but 107 books read for the year is hardly nothing.)

So, as in previous years, I present my top reads in no particular order.

Top Ten New Fiction (some are ARCS which aren't yet released, but read in 2021)

The Strangers

I loved revisiting these characters from The Break, and I also appreciated how Vermette seamlessly wove in the realities of COVID protocols as they relate to the fostercare and penal systems. Much of this deeply affected my heart and mind.

Burntcoat

I loved the writing in this: I do believe this will be read years from now by people wanting to understand what living through COVID was like (even if this is just metaphorical and quite a bit steamier than my usual reads).

When We Lost Our Heads

With Heather O'Neill, it's all about delightful language and I loved every word of this.

Sea of Tranquility

Another novel written under COVID lockdown which perfectly captures the essence of the experience; my favourite Emily St John Mandel work to date.

Nothing the Same, Everything Haunted: The Ballad of Motl the Cowboy

This is the book that I keep telling everyone was my favourite read of 2021: the language and the ideas totally captivated and provoked me.

The Mystery of Right and Wrong

As a longtime fan of Wayne Johnston's, what this novel reveals of the author's own reality was absolutely mind-blowing to me.

August Into Winter

This novel contains everything I love about Guy Vanderhaeghe: a thrilling plot with beautiful writing.

All's Well

I do love anything related to Shakespeare and the mounting of his plays, but more than that, this felt like raw and relatable feminist fiction

What Strange Paradise

A worthy winner of the Giller Prize, this is such a perfect examination of the refugee experience that I can't stop thinking about it.

Tomnorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

This is another book that keeps coming back to me; quirky and different with fantastic characters, I loved every bit of this.

Top Five-ish Nonfiction Books Read in 2021

The Infinite Staircase

My top paradigm-challenging read.

Vagina Obscura and The Menopause Manifesto are a natural pairing (as they both advocate for women having the information they need to make informed health decisions) but both also deserve to stand on their own as fascinating and important reads.

I Had a Brother Once and Vulnerability is My Superpower are a less natural pairing, but as interestingly-formatted memoirs (a prose poem and a comic collection) they each deeply affected me in unique ways.

Around the World in 80 Books

I do love books about books and writing (and so to this one I will add two honourable mentions: The Meaning of Myth and the wonderful Elena Ferrante's In the Margins)

Why Fish Don't Exist

I also love books about animals and this one was one of those fascinating memoirs dressed up as a scientific investigation that can be great when they're done well (I also enjoyed the literary/animal mashup of Aesop's Animals: The Science Behind the Fables and feel compelled to add two dishonourable mentions, from which I had expected so much more: Susan Orlean's On Animals and Mary Roach's Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law.)

And although I didn't get around to much classic fiction this year, I did really enjoy Moby Dick (and especially as I read it soon after the wonderful Fathoms: The World in the Whale), I was fascinated by the art project around The Old Woman and the Sea, I was only mostly satisfied by Walden: Life in the Woods (but am certainly enlarged by having finally gotten around to it), and although Agnes Grey might have been my least favourite Brontë novel so far, it certainly wasn't a waste of my time. Here's to many more classic reads in the years to come!

I feel like I usually have more to say than this — and with oversized losses and the happiest of gains this year (I do so love having a son-in-law), this feels like a year about which I should have so much to say — but 2021 was definitely a Schitt show and I'm done with it, ready to look forward to the future. Here's to embracing all the things that work for me and blowing up those that don't!

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?

With the grandiose subtitle of “A New History of Humanity”, I was certainly expecting a lot from David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything; and in retrospect, I may have been expecting too much, and too much of something different altogether. I love reading stories of how people live in different places and different times — and those stories are here — but mostly, this reads like a one-sided argument that I don’t know anything about and that I didn’t know was taking place. The bottom line: Graeber and Wengrow argue that there’s nothing inevitable about the progression of human civilisation to the point where we find ourselves today; and that modern academia is an echochamber for that theory of progress, dismissing and suppressing evidence to the contrary. I didn’t realise until afterwards that Graeber, who has since passed, was a noted anarchist activist and one of the founders of the Occupy Movement, so while I understand why this book is antiestablishment, I was nevertheless disappointed that it didn’t offer up any ideas for how we could be doing things better. Overall, this was an often fascinating and paradigm-challenging read, but it didn’t amount to much, and some quirky writing (which only served to lengthen a long book) force me to round down to three stars. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Social theory is largely a game of make-believe in which we pretend, just for the sake of argument, that there’s just one thing going on: essentially, we reduce everything to a cartoon so as to be able to detect patterns that would otherwise be invisible. As a result, all real progress in social science has been rooted in the courage to say that things are, in the final analysis, slightly ridiculous: the work of Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud or Claude Lévis-Strauss being only particularly salient cases in point. One must simplify the world to discover something new about it. The problem comes when, long after the discovery has been made, people continue to simplify.

Post-Enlightenment, we have been taught to think of early humans as living in one of two opposing states: that described by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (a state of peaceful harmony with nature until the first person claimed a plot of land as their own; ushering in inequality, onerous bureaucracy, and state-sponsored violence) and that of Thomas Hobbes (who described life as “nasty, brutish, and short” until state control was introduced to stem interpersonal violence). Following in this vein, modern pop history writers — the likes of Francis Fukuyama, Jared Diamond, Steven Pinker, and Yuval Noah Harari; all smugly dismissed by Graeber and Wengrow — take it for granted that the rise of human civilsation was an inevitable progression from unself-examined hunter-gatherer societies to early agriculture, the formation of cities, through to a culmination in modern democracy and capitalism. In particular, the authors chastise Harari (who once wrote that early humans were either as aggressive as chimpanzees or as peaceful as bonobos) as denying humanity to these early humans (literally comparing them to animals until they first started cultivating grain), and I must admit that that is a valid criticism: why can’t we think of early humans as actual people who made conscious choices about the kind of society in which they wanted to live? By telling the stories of many types of societies across time and space — including those that experimented with agriculture, monarchy, and city-states before abandoning them as untenable — the authors prove that there really isn’t anything inevitable about where we find ourselves today. I liked learning the stories of those who experimented with agriculture before giving it up (including the folks who built Stonehenge, who had reverted to acorn-harvesting at the time of their big project) and I appreciated that the authors took issue with historians who use terms like “intermediary period” or “proto-something” to describe times when early humans weren’t engaging in those activities we think of as markers of civilisation (as though people were living in stable societies for generations, just waiting for something important to happen). My thinking was challenged about these early societies — especially as it was mostly formed by the pop history writers that Graeber and Wengrow dismiss — and I like being challenged.

Perhaps if our species does endure, and we one day look backwards from this yet unknowable future, aspects of the remote past that now seem like anomalies — say, bureaucracies that work on a community scale; cities governed by neighbourhood councils; systems of government where women hold a preponderance of formal positions; or forms of land management based on care-taking rather than ownership and extraction — will seem like the really significant breakthroughs, and great stone pyramids or statues more like historical curiosities. What if we were to take that approach now and look at, say, Minoan Crete or Hopewell not as random bumps on a road that leads inexorably to states and empires, but as alternate possibilities: roads not taken?

Again, I appreciate the scholarship on display in The Dawn of Everything — and especially as it describes those people who simply walked away from the bureaucracies and overlords who made their lives unpleasant, leading to the ruins of former cities that now dot the globe — but while it is provocative to think of modern Western civilisation as an entirely replaceable construct (and I can’t deny that it doesn’t work for everyone), it feels naive for the authors to imply that it can all be torn down without offering an idea of what would come next. Honestly, as interesting as the history was, I kept waiting for the point; it’s not like today we could just walk away from our cities and countries and find empty space in which to mindfully start over; understanding history in this case does not feel, in itself, like a road map to a better future. I still enjoyed the read.

Fifty Words for Snow

 

There is much poignant art and literature about polar purity and silence, but the longer I spent among the snow, the more I suspected such tropes are born of luxury and distance. It is a view that overwrites the peopled landscape, ignores the tracks of sleds and snowmobiles that cross it, the busy burrows and root systems beneath it. As time passed and I looked more closely, I realised snow does not always appear white. As I listened more carefully, I realised that snow was not silent. I spoke to those who worked with snow, from Inuit hunters to Scottish hill farmers, and noticed that their traditional knowledge was often enshrined in highly differentiated vocabularies. Fifty Words for Snow is a journey to discover snow in cultures around the world through different languages.

I don’t know what I thought I would get from Fifty Words for Snow — its description made me think that it would have something to do with how culture shapes language and how language then reflects culture in return; and further, how declining rates of snow will contribute to losses of culture and language — and as a resident of Canada, I thought there would be something for me to identify with here. But for the most part, there wasn’t much. Author Nancy Campbell — a poet and essayist — has lived and worked in Arctic landscapes, and with an interest in how climate change is impacting those landscapes (and the people still trying to eke out a traditional life within them) and with a partner whose stroke-induced aphasia has made her more attuned to “the complexity of language loss”, I was somehow set up to expect more from this. What there is: Literally, fifty words for snow from languages around the world, followed by an essay (from a paragraph to many pages) that gives some context for how the word is used (whether in everyday use, mythology/literature, or the sciences) , each accompanied by a gorgeous photo of a snowflake by Wilson Bentley (1865-1931, the first known person to take detailed photographs of snowflakes and record their features). What is missing: A through theme or analysis or overarching conclusion; this is more coffee table book than narrative nonfiction (and to be fair, I wasn’t promised more than a coffee table book). (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Pana snow knife (Inuktitut: ᐸᓇ) / Sparrow batch spring snow (Newfoundland English)

To begin my thoughts close to home, it was annoying to me that Campbell referred to Canada’s largest and most northern territory as “the state of Nunavut”, adding “Nunavut is also the newest state”. (We have provinces and territories in Canada — there are no geographical or political areas or communities we would refer to as “states” — and even googling the word for its generic definition doesn’t satisfactorily describe Nunavut.) Later, Campbell writes that the residents of Newfoundland refer to their island dialect as “Newfinese”, and that’s a word I’ve never heard used before. All of this to say: If I don’t recognise Canada (definitely a snowy country) in the two mentions made of it in a book on snow, I don’t know how far I can trust the author to tell me about other snow-bound cultures. Many of the words that Campbell has chosen are sourced from polar countries, but she seems to have found more delight in sharing words from cultures we don’t necessarily equate with snow: from Hawaiian (Hau kea, white snow; “most likely to be found on a simmering crater”), to Thai (H̄ima, snow; useful to describe the one time it allegedly snowed in Thailand in recorded history, in 1955), and Amharic (Barado, snow or hail, used in the debate among early European explorers over the presence of snow in the Ethiopian mountains). When it comes to the literary, it was more meaningful to me to learn about the word Snemand (snowman, Danish) and how it was used in a famous story by Hans Christian Andersen than the chapter on Calóg shneachta (snowflake, Irish) that then goes on to recount James Joyce’s “The Dead” and a conversation about snow that happens at a party (what Campbell cites as “one of the most famous mentions of snow in literature.”) The shortest chapter reads, in its entirety:

Cheotnun first snow (Korean: 첫눈) The word for snow in Korean, nun, is the same word as is used for ‘eye’. And so if you experience the first snowfall of the year – cheotnun – with someone you have eyes for, it is said that true love will drift into your arms.

I don’t know if I find that as complete an entry as the Inuit process of building an iglu, and it’s this feeling of unevenness that makes this collection feel themeless. But there were many interesting tidbits I learned along the way:

• Immiaq melted ice or snow; beer (Greenlandic) The great glacier Sermeq Kujalleq...calves around 46 km3 of ice every year – an amount that would cover the annual water consumption of the USA.

• Seaŋáš granulated snow (Sámi of Norway) while there are around one hundred Sámi terms for snow, the words relating to reindeer are estimated at over a thousand.

• Jäätee ice road (Estonian) Drivers must keep to speeds of between 25 km/ h and 40 km/ h – the lower limit is important. No stopping is allowed. This is a precaution against changes to the car’s rate of progress causing a wave under the ice; if such a wave accumulates it can be strong enough to crack it. For the same reason vehicles must travel at least two minutes apart, and so drivers wait at the shore for a green light before they set out. These strict safety measures are accompanied by an unexpected road rule: it’s forbidden to wear seatbelts, because drivers and passengers might have to exit the car speedily in the event of the ice cracking.

And I did connect with the mythological — and only wish there was more of this — as with Yuki-onna snow woman (Japanese: 雪女):

Are all human encounters with the elements so ill-fated? Is it possible to keep our most profound dealings with nature a secret? Will the snows stay forever, or will winter turn to spring? Whether the yuki-onna is a malevolent ghost stealing lonely lives in the wilderness or a supernatural beauty living in disguise among humans, she affirms the transformative qualities of snow.

(I also didn’t know that Japan has the deepest snowfalls in the world — 40m/year in the Japanese Alps — and that there is a highway known as the Snow Corridor that travels between 20m high snow walls; I would love to see that.) So: I would have liked more of this — more writing about actually snowy countries and how that snow influences their lives and their mythologies, with a touch of authorial analysis thrown in — but again, I wasn’t actually promised that and another reader might be completely pleased with what is to be found here. Middle of the road three stars for me.

This Is Happiness

 

It was a condensed explanation, but I came to understand him to mean you could stop at, not all, but most of the moments of your life, stop for one heartbeat and, no matter what the state of your head or heart, say This is happiness, because of the simple truth that you were alive to say it.

I love me an Irish storyteller, and having previously loved Niall Williams’ History of the Rain, I thought that This is Happiness would be a slam dunk — but it was more of a shot that circles the rim forever before falling off; edge of your seat in the moment without ultimate satisfaction. And it’s hard to put my finger on why this took me so long to read — I kept falling asleep after a couple of chapters and was never excited to pick it up again — but still, it has really fine and interesting writing, engaging characters, and thoughtfulness behind the plot; it just failed to score with me. Rounding down to three stars out of sheer exhaustion.

When you saw someone in the river your first thought was not swimming, it was drowning. In a lifetime there’s more than one doorway. Even as I was running I think I knew this was one. It’s not so easy to run across a field in springtime, and in my memory a field like Ganga’s, pock and lump, dung and rushes and slick April grass, was treachery. And because an old man has only the story of his own life I am running across it still, a lanky seventeen-year-old from Dublin, shy and obdurate both, running with a premonition that I thought was doom but was maybe fate if you’re a party to that. I was running believing I was going to save him, when of course it was he who would save me.

As it opens, This is Happiness sees seventeen-year-old Noel “Noe” Crowe leaving the seminary with a crisis of faith, and when he elects to spend some time with his rural paternal grandparents (whom he calls Ganga and Doadie), Noe couldn’t have known that this would be at a time of profound local change; changes that would affect his own life’s path. Noe is telling this story from the vantage of old age — he states that these events happened over six decades earlier, so somewhere in the 1950’s — and we get the benefit of both hearing the well-worn stories that made such an impact on a once naive youth and the meaning that was made of the events over the course of sixty years. The major events: A long string of hot and sunny days in this famously drenched corner of Ireland spurs wonder and impatience; electricity is finally run to the village of Faha and its surrounds; Noe suffers an injury and falls hard for the doctor’s daughters; Noe’s grandparents provide lodging for one of the electricity workers, and this Christy is a larger-than-life character who will demonstrate for Noe a deeper way of feeling and living:

”O ho now!” I shouted, both of us happy as heathens beneath the warm breath of night sky and pedalling now in the boy hectic of blind momentum and nocturnal velocity so we missed the turn at Crossan’s went straight and straight on and straight in through Crossan’s open gate and across the wild bump-bump-bump and sudden su-su-su suck of their bog meadow where my front wheel sank in a rushy rut and I and a cry and a jet of brown vomit were projected out over the handlebars and flew glorious for one long and sublime instant before landing face-first in the cold puddle and muck of reality.

Noe is a believable and sympathetic character, tottering over the brink of adulthood; Ganga and Doadie are colourful and authentic and everything you’d want your grandparents to be; and Christy brings the hijinx and the heartache, and as he and Noe go pub-crawling throughout the county in search of a (locally) legendary fiddle player, Christie is capable of unironically throwing his head back, and with eyes closed and fists clenched, serenading the air with timeless songs of love and loss:

Christy sang. I cannot tell you how startling it was. If you believe in a soul, as I do, then my soul stirred. The song was not composed by Christy, but by the alchemy of performance, you felt it was. It seems to me the quality that makes any book, music, painting worthwhile is life, just that. Books, music, painting are not life, can never be as full, rich, complex, surprising or beautiful, but the best of them can catch an echo of that, can turn you back to look out the window, go out the door aware that you’ve been enriched, that you have been in the company of something alive that has caused you to realise again how astonishing life is, and you leave the book, gallery or concert hall with that illumination, which feels I’m going to say holy, by which I mean human raptness.

And maybe that’s the crux of it — a dangerous line for any novelist to provide for a reader — as much as I did like moments in this book, I don’t leave it feeling illuminated. To return to my b-ball analogy: This was like a long game of pickup with a good sweat and some nice plays, but no one’s keeping score, and nothing about it makes this outing on the court feel more exceptional than the hundreds of other times I’ve been there. Worthwhile, but not remarkable.