Goodreads Wrapped: A Year in Review
To wrap up 2023, the flo. team is sharing our favourite reads from this year and the journeys we’ve taken as readers over the last 12 months!
Senka Stankovic—Editor-in-Chief
I opened the 2023 year with Where Things Touch: A Meditation on Beauty by Bahar Orang, which provided me with a literary soundtrack for a tumultuous year, encouraging me to find beauty in the difficult. In this “part lyric essay, part prose poem,” Orang uses her lived experience as a medical student, a lover, and a person to source definitions of beauty.
To further destabilize my sense of self, I read Benjamín Labatut’s When We Cease to Understand the World, where a fictionalized approach is used to present biographies of real-life mathematicians, physicists, and chemists in a series of short stories. By the last story, it’s nearly impossible to tell fact from fiction. My Goodreads review for this book writes only “made me wish i was a mathematician” next to a five-star rating: if this doesn’t encourage you to pick up a copy from your local library, I’m not sure what will.
Two non-fiction reads stuck out this year, and both happen to be how-to books. How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression and Transcendence by Michael Pollan and How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell have more to offer than catchy yet uninformative titles followed by subtitles that are forced to overcompensate. How to Change Your Mind presents a dynamic history of psychedelics, including their uses in indigenous traditions, and the accidental discovery of LSD-25 by Albert Hoffman. How to do Nothing argues that doing nothing, or denying productivity, is a political act. Both books subtly encourage stepping away from one reality or way of being into another, in the hopes of gaining insights into oneself and rediscovering one's connection to the world around them.
I finished the year off with John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, a book that my partner has been encouraging me to read since we met. It didn’t disappoint. The book has rich dialogue, dynamic characters and a plotline that offers a twist on the religious tale of Cain and Abel.
In the upcoming year, I’m looking forward to reading more experimental short fiction.
Erin Samant—Managing Editor
It came as no surprise that this year my reading was almost entirely Canadian literature. Initially, I had set out to read 25 books, but I ended up with 58 (!!) reads that included a wider variety of genres than I have ever read before (yes this Capricorn even read a romance novel!). I picked up a few viral novels like A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, but nearly all of my favourites were Canadian stories.
I started the year off in a bit of slump, preferring to read collections of poetry to the daunting task of tackling a novel and it led me to three of my now favourite books. The first was Natasha Kanapé Fonatine’s Bleuets et abricots, which was so beautifully written that I couldn’t have started the year off on a better note. I then read Exhibitionist by Molly Cross-Blanchard (I borrowed this book from flo. EiC Senka and loved it so much that I got my own copy!) which was so unabashedly real and honest that it both made me blush and laugh out loud! Another fantastic collection of poetry I picked up this year was Monoculture by Sue Goyette, which considers the ways in which we interact with nature and what that means for the future (I highly recommend for anyone interested in eco critical poetry!).
My favourite book this year was Cherie Dimaline’s Empire of Wild, which was probably the first mystery novel I’ve ever voluntarily read! It was an incredible blend of traditional storytelling and modern technology that was so engaging, it rekindled my love for fiction! It is closely followed by my love for Waubgeshig Rice’s Moon of The Turning Leaves, my most highly-anticipated read of the year and sequel to Moon of The Crusted Snow (one of my all time faves!). It did NOT disappoint! I won’t give any spoilers, but it was the perfect way to end the series (I cried…a lot!).
The most notable task I challenged myself with this year was to read more in French and I’m so glad I did. I finally read Kukum, which had been sitting on my bookshelf since 2020, and my only regret is that I hadn’t read it sooner! It was so beautifully written and I felt totally immersed in Almanda’s world! Another favourite was Em by Kim Thúy, which looked back on untold stories from the American War in Vietnam. It was heartbreaking and moving, but so incredibly eye-opening to a rarely discussed history.
In 2024, I have a feeling that I will stick to my favourite genres (I’ve already had my eye on a few memoirs for the New Year…), but if I’ve learned anything from this year of reading it’s this: expanding my horizons is almost always worth it and wasting your money on trendy books is not (sorry #BookTok fans, but I found Sally Rooney’s Normal People incredibly underwhelming).
Katrina Wilcox—Fiction Editor
Welcome to my Goodreads Wrapped! Unsurprisingly, Romance, Fantasy, and Classics dominated my reading preferences for 2023.
I’ve been trying my best this year to catch up on the hype for the Blood and Ash series by Jennifer L. Armentrout and have made her my most read author of 2023. The series is just okay but the prequel series, Flesh and Fire, is positively delicious.
This year, my goal was to read 60 books, but I closed the year having devoured 46. Surprisingly, I gave 5 stars to more than half of my reads—25 books, to be exact. Some were nostalgic rereads like Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J.K. Rowling and A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas, while others included beautifully illustrated graphic novels such as Avatar: The High Ground (Volumes 1, 2, 3) by Sherri L. Smith and The Girl from the Sea by Molly Knox Ostertag. But among these, a select few deserve a bit more attention.
As for Me and My House by Sinclair Ross featured in a previous blog post. I will rave about this novel until the day I die. I read it almost a year ago, but the story and the writing is still so fresh in my mind that it feels like I read it last week. It’s definitely the book that has made me think the most this year and I cannot recommend it enough.
Yearbook by Seth Rogen and Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese proved to be not just fantastic reads but were incredible as audiobooks. Seth Rogen’s autobiography was hilarious and endearing, especially because hearing him felt like having an intimate conversation with an old friend. “Indian Horse” was such a powerful novel made even more so through the brilliant storytelling of the audiobook’s narrator Jason Ryll.
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler was my favourite book this year. The imagery and detail in description was both lovely and horrifying as the novel is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi.
With such a great reading year I’m excited to see what 2024 will bring. Hopefully, next year will be as rich as 2023. Cheers!
Maya Chorney—Events Coordinator
I read 28 books in 2023. I always feel like I’ve read too little, mostly because my procrastination tendencies lead to falling down internet rabbit holes instead of into books I genuinely want to read. But I also have to remind myself that this number doesn’t include books I abandoned at the 70-90% mark, blog entries, articles, audio dramas, classmates’ screenplays for a workshop, zines, or any of the poetry I read from a variety of sources. How much do we not count because Goodreads doesn’t approve it? But I digress. Of the books I did read, several were rereads:
• The Hunger Games and Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins — As with The Catcher in the Rye, I reread The Hunger Games for a course on YA lit. I realized that a lot of it went over my head in middle school, including Collins’ exploration of just war theory. I’m also surprised by how badly I misinterpreted Katniss, who I used to intensely dislike! I’m wrapping up Catching Fire (only about 30 pages to go) and plan on eating the third book soon so I can check out the prequel.
• The Raven Cycle by Maggie Stiefvater — During the pandemic April of 2020, I organized a competitive team readathon and ploughed through 23 books. The Raven Boys was one of them. I peer-pressured my Mom into reading the whole series so we could discuss it. Unfortunately for our ill-fated buddy read, I didn’t follow suit until this year. I love how tangible and strange the characters are, how Welsh mythology interacts with the witchy women of 300 Fox Way and their unsettling tarot readings, and how languid, spooky vibes permeate everything.
• Witch Hat Atelier by Kamome Shirahama—Whenever I stayed home sick from school growing up, my ritual was cozying up under a red blanket, eating soup, and watching movies like Kiki’s Delivery Service. Reading this manga series feels kind of like that. It’s whimsical and beautifully illustrated and features a witch teacher who has the most amazing outfit that I want to recreate.
Alongside the rereads, here are some notable new-to-me reads:
• Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity by José Esteban Muñoz — Sometimes dry, often challenging. I read this for a project on queer arts and community building.
• Hell Followed with Us by Andrew Joseph White — More horror-adjacent than my standard fare, but I loved this. I want to expand my scaredy-cat horizons and read more spooky stuff.
• Smoke Proofs: Essays on Literary Publishing, Printing, and Typography by Andrew Steeves — Part of the research I did while writing an essay for a grad course I took on the history of small presses in Canada. This course cemented my desire to pursue an M.A. in English.
2024 Reading Forecast: I’m planning to squeeze in the rest of Catching Fire and a Witch Hat Atelier book before the year is officially over. My reading resolution for the upcoming year is, as always, “read more!” More poetry, writings about writing, spooky stories (but not too much, I don’t want to fuel my quasi-insomnia), and non-fiction (esp. folklore, mythology, and political texts). More from the hordes of unread books I already own, which are plotting to overthrow me for my neglect. And, finally, I’m getting ready to tackle House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski. Wish me luck, and happy reading!