While we maintain that reading should be for fun and not obligation, we do love a good challenge when it comes to our reading habits (exhibit A). Check out what some of team ALU is resolving this year, and which books we’re putting straight on top of our 2019 TBR pile.
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Christen’s resolution: Happy lunch reading, not sad desk eatingI’m looking forward to sampling some lunch-break sized poetry and essay collections in 2019, including Disquieting, Essays on Silence by Cynthia Cruz (Book*hug). Cruz explores how lives of resistance interact with the ideologies of contemporary Neoliberal culture, and connections between mental illness, refusal, and silence. Exploring the experience of the working class, Cruz delves into the turn to disquietude, valuing open-endedness, complexity, and difficulty. Cruz draws from multiple art forms, theory, and philosophy to offer alternative ways of being in the current world as well as making change.
Leyla’s resolution: Read more short storiesI often find myself hung up on 1000+ page tomes that take me forever to read, so this year my resolution is to read more short stories!I love lit that’s slightly off-kilter—the weird and surreal. So in 2019, I’m hoping to read Instruction Manual for Swallowing (ECW Press) by Adam Marek. This collection puts people up against some seriously odd situations, from working in a restaurant for zombies to a couple who learns they are pregnant with 37 babies. These stories use the surreal as a way to connect us to each other through the commonality of the shared human experience. In a review, the National Post claims “Marek’s talent for an almost sweet grotesqueness is on full display.” Frankly, you had me at grotesqueness…
Tan’s resolution: Free-range readingThe past year got the better of me, and as a result, I’ve read 10 fewer books than I’d hoped for. However, I did manage to keep to my 4/5 Canadian-authored and independently published resolution!In 2019, I am resolving NOT to challenge myself and to indulge in “free-range reading” for the first time in my 10-year publishing career. I think I will start with a book that’s been in my TBR pile for a few months now: Keith Maillard’s Twin Studies (Freehand Books).
Mandy’s resolution: Get social about my fave booksDespite chatting and writing about books at All Lit Up, I rarely share my favourites on my personal social media. That was old me! The new me plans to post about what I’m reading, which books I loved, and what TBR piles I’m hoarding on my nightstand (take that, Marie Kondo). At the top of my 2019 reading list is Shannon Mullally’s The Second Detective (Anvil Press)—winner of the 40th Annual 3-Day Novel Writing Contest—”a deliriously entertaining reimagining of the hard-boiled detective novel, featuring a mysterious narrator, a missing husband, and a lascivious mountain goat with interspecies interests.” Yes, please!
