ALU Book Club: Further Reading for After A Gentle Habit

In our final book club post of the summer (don’t mind us crying over here…), we’re recommending some other CanLit titles to keep you reading long after you’re done A Gentle Habit. And if you missed our July book club pick, there are even more fantastic books we can highly recommend here.* * *

If the highlight of A Gentle Habit to you was the memorable characters, dealing with these strange obsessions then How to Get Along With Women by Elisabeth de Mariaffi (Invisible Publishing) is for you. Nominated for the 2013 Giller Prize, it is a collection of stories about power, identity, and sexuality. The reader is invited in to experience pivotal moments in these characters’ lives where, for better or worse, they see who they really are.

Cherie writes from an Indigenous perspective; in our interview with her last week she said, “I feel a tremendous responsibility to be honourable and as truthful as I can be, which is difficult since our communities are diverse, vibrant, layered and, in many ways, esoteric to the people who breathe life into them.” If you’re interested in reading another perspective from the Metis community, try Lisa Bird-Wilson’s debut collection of stories Just Pretending (Coteau Books), which delves into the ideas of identity and belonging, and the relationships between children and parents.

In our staff discussion we mentioned that one of the ways we felt an immediate connection with the characters in A Gentle Habit was the visceral language and inclusion of bodily habits. If you also appreciated this candid discussion of the body, try Leak by Kate Hargreaves (BookThug). In this collection of poetry, Hargreaves deconstructs the body to discover new ways to understand “the borders and leaks of our everyday existence.”

In A Gentle Habit, Cherie explores characters with fairly mundane lives that develop unusual habits and obsessions. If this idea of the mundane turned on its head intrigues you, you should read The Most Heartless Town in Canada by Elaine McCluskey (Anvil Press). The story is about an average small town on the east coast that is thrust into the national spotlight after a bizarre photo wins a contest. The figure in the photo, a teenage girl, explains herself and the events around the photo seven years later.* * *Thank you to everyone who read and followed along with us this summer! We had so much fun getting to do a deeper dive into a couple out of the thousands of amazing books we have available for you on the site. If you missed any of our summer book club action, get caught up on all the fun here.