Best Read of 2018?

What was your favorite read of 2018?

It's time to compile the best of 2018! If you want your favorite book of 2018 included on the last Reading Envy Episode of the year, please send me an email at reading envy at gmail.

Please include:
1. Your name as you'd like it included
2. Your location (optional)
3. Your favorite read from 2018. Like all Reading Envy episodes, it does not need to be published in 2018, just something you enjoyed this year.

You may also record this, in fact I prefer it so that episode is not all my voice! It should be less than 5 minutes, and saved as an MP3, and include the same info as above.

Deadline: December 15, 2018. But please do send earlier than that.

Reading Envy 132: Whimsy and Density with Anna Baillie-Karas

Anna Baillie-Karas is a reader and podcaster from Adelaide, Australia. She joins Jenny in the Reading Envy pub to talk about book award lists, expanding our range, organizing our home libraries, and books we've read lately!

Download or listen via this link: Reading Envy 132: Whimsy and Density.

Subscribe to the podcast via this link: Feedburner
Or subscribe via Apple Podcasts by clicking: Subscribe
Or listen through TuneIn
Or listen on Google Play
Listen via Stitcher
NEW! Listen through Spotify


Books Discussed:



Milkman by Anna Burns
Our Homesick Songs by Emma Hooper
The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson
A Coffin for Dimitrios by Eric Ambler
Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton
There There by Tommy Orange

Other Mentions:

Books on the Go (podcast)
The First Tuesday Book Club (Australian tv show)
Man Booker Prize
Clock Dance by Anne Tyler
Circe by Madeleine Miller
Book Riot Read Harder Challenge
National Book Award (now includes translated literature award)
Disoriental by Negar Djavadi
Tricks by Domenico Starnoni
The Romanovs: 1613-1918 by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Simon Winchester
Shawn Mooney (Booktube)
Kendra Winchester (Booktube)
Simon Savidge from the Readers (Booktube)
What Kamil Reads (Booktube)
No Bones by Anna Burns
Women's Prize for Fiction
The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh
ScotiaBank Giller Prize
Get Booked (podcast)
Etta and Otto and Russell and James by Emma Hooper
The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Mythos by Stephen Fry
Heroes by Stephen Fry
Ulysses by James Joyce
Suite Francaise by Irène Némirovsky
The Winter Queen (Erast Fandorin #1) by Boris Akunin
Before Sunrise (film)
Before Sunset (film)
Before Midnight (film)
Lost Connections by Johann Hari
21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari
Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World by Tom Wright and Bradley Hope
Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty
Annie Muktuk & Other Stories by Norma Dunning


Related Episodes:
Episode 002 - Return of the Euthanized Book with guest Bryan Alexander
Episode 006 -  Bailey's Women's Prize 2014
Episode 074 - The Books We Didn't Love in High School with Blaine DeSantis
Episode 086 - The Queen of Bailing with Shawn Mooney 
Episode 098 - Just a Bunch of Stuff that Happened with Bryan Bibb 
Episode 123 - Godlets and Forests with Lauren Weinhold

Stalk us online:

Books on the Go Podcast
Anna is @abailliekaras on Instagram
Anna on Twitter
Anna at Goodreads
Jenny at Goodreads
Jenny on Twitter
Jenny is @readingenvy on Instagram and Litsy

Review: In the Night Wood

In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Now that the weather is finally turning gloomy, you might be looking for an atmospheric read. Look no further! This book blends folklore, English countryside, mysterious books, missing children, and a wood that beckons....

I enjoyed Bailey's short stories that I also read this year, and I may have a slight preference for those because they were more along the lines of dark fantasy and sometimes humorous, always full of humanity. Sometimes I felt trapped in this book because it gets a bit circular, and you know that the characters are doing dangerous things and the author is just going to make you watch it happen! But that's part of the overall tone of the novel that is so effective. Some of the characters feel more like archetypes than individuals, but again, that suits the book too since there is a layer in it of another book, also called In the Night Wood.

At the heart of the story is a damaged marriage, with both people destroyed by grief with an added undercurrent of infidelity that hasn't even started to be dealt with. That may be the greater horror in the end.

(I marked this little part:)
"They were silent then, listening to the sound of their marriage calve around them, like a glacier, like sea ice, as fragile and as cold.
'Pass the salt, please,' he said."

View all my reviews

Reading Envy 131: Tartan Noir and More with Claire Duffy

Claire Duffy is a crime writer in Glasgow, and overall interesting person who came on the Reading Envy podcast to chat books. We talk about how tartan noir has very little to do with tartans, the crime community in Scotland, and how classics change as we get older.

Download or listen via this link: Reading Envy 131: Tartan Noir and More.

Subscribe to the podcast via this link: Feedburner
Or subscribe via Apple Podcasts by clicking: Subscribe
Or listen through TuneIn
Or listen on Google Play
Listen via Stitcher
NEW! Listen through Spotify


Books Discussed:



Garnethill by Denise Mina
The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo
Finding Peggy by Meg Henderson
Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore by Elizabeth Rush
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell


Other Mentions: 

Dark of Night, Episode One by C.S. Duffy
The Bridge (tv show)
Mary Higgins Clark
Bloody Scotland Festival
Mark Billingham
Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh
Trainspotting (film)
Ian Rankin
Val McDermid
Noir at the Bar, Edinburgh
Noir at the Bar: An Oral History
National Book Award (USA)
Man Booker Prize
Not the Booker Prize
I See You by Clare Mackintosh
Let Me Lie by Clare Mackintosh
Weird Things Customers Say in Bookstores by Jen Campbell
Downton Abbey (tv series)
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (film)
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
A Coffin for Dimitrios by Eric Ambler

Related Episodes (those with crime):
Episode 058 - Wishing for a Sequel with Scott D. Danielson
Episode 060 - A Good Era for Communists with Rose Davis
Episode 062 - Olfactory Stimuli with David Galloway
Episode 072 - Books Are My Bag with Sarah K
Episode 074 - The Books We Didn't Love in High School with Blaine DeSantis
Episode 108 - Venn Diagram with Yanira Ramirez 
Episode 110 - The Accidental Love Episode with Casey Stepaniuk
Episode 114 - Raised by Wolves with Karen Acosta
Episode 115 - Quote, Unquote with Scott Eaton 

Stalk us online:

Claire is @csduffywriter on Instagram
Claire is also @writer.on.the.go on Instagram if you want to check out her dictating while exercising project
Claire on Twitter
Claire on Facebook
Claire on the internet
Jenny at Goodreads
Jenny on Twitter
Jenny is @readingenvy on Instagram and Litsy

Books Read September 2018: 219 - 247

Pictured: This month's 5-star reads

219. The Wrong Heaven by Amy Bonnaffons ***** (print galley; my review)
220. Struck by Lightning by Chris Colfer *** (Hoopla audiobook; my review)
221. The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo ***** (Hoopla audiobook; my review)
222. Ohio by Stephen Markley **** (eARC; my review)
223. A Man Called Ove by Fredrick Backman *** (postal book swap; my review)
224. Secrets of a Hutterite Kitchen by Mary-Ann Kirkby **** (interlibrary loan; my review)
225. The Hidden Life of Trees by Peter Wohlleben **** (Hoopla eBook; my review)
226. Rodeo in Reverse by Lindsay Alexander **** (eARC; my review)
227. Dumplin' by Julie Murphy **** (Hoopla audiobook; my review)
228. Solo by Kwame Alexander *** (Hoopla audiobook; my review)
229. The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell **** (eARC; my review)
230. Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore by Elizabeth Rush ***** (Hoopla eBook; my review)
231. From a Low and Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan *** (eARC; my review)
232. Sabrina by Nick Drnaso ** (library book; my review)
233. The End of the Moment We Had by Toshiki Okada **** (eARC; my review)
234. The Best American Poetry 2018 ed. Dana Gioia **** (eARC; my review)
235. The Water Cure by Sophie Mackintosh **** (eARC and library book; my review)
236. Normal People by Sally Rooney ***** (eARC; my review)
237. A Coffin for Dimitrios by Eric Ambler **** (postal book swap; my review)
238. Baking as Biography by Diane Tye **** (interlibrary loan; my review)
239. The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan **** (Audible audiobook; my review)
240. In Our Mad and Furious City by Guy Gunaratne **** (library book; my review)
241. Premonitions by Elizabeth Schmul **** (eARC; my review)
242. Milkman by Anna Burns ** (eARC; my review)
243. There There by Tommy Orange **** (library book; my review)
244. Our Homesick Songs by Emma Hooper ***** (library book; my review)
245. Girls and Boys by Dennis Kelly **** (Audible exclusive; my review)
246. Annie Muktuk and Other Stories by Norma Dunning ***** (personal copy; my review)
247. The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah *** (library eBook; my review)

Total books read: 29
Review copies: 12

Audio: 6
eBook: 12
Print:11

Canada/Alaska 2018: 5
Postal Book Swaps: 2
Newest Literary Fiction Group: YA Theme: 4
Science September: 2

Giller Prize Longlist: 1

Man Booker Prize Longlist: 5
Man Booker Prize Shortlist: 1

National Book Award Longlist: 2

Review: Our Homesick Songs

Our Homesick Songs by Emma Hooper
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I requested this book after hearing about it in Litsy, not realizing it was longlisted for the Giller Prize, but always nice to accidentally read from a prize list!

Big Running, Newfoundland, has run out of fish, and the government is pushing people to leave, as they will no longer support the infrastructure. The Connors don't really want to leave - Martha and Aidan, the parents, are rotating traveling north for work to make enough money to live, while Finn and Cora, the children, are finding creative ways to stay. The story alternates between the story about Martha and Aidan's original romance and the "present day" which in the book is 1994, with the village staring down the reality of a depleted ocean.

In between is all kinds of magic, somehow making this the perfect book for me. Folk songs and lassie pies and meetcutes and just a lot of connectivity and coincidence, probably when I as a reader needed it most.

View all my reviews

Review: Annie Muktuk and Other Stories

Annie Muktuk and Other Stories by Norma Dunning
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book was mentioned on the Best Reads of 2017 Reading Envy Podcast episode and then Lindy included it in a package of books from Canada, so I pretty much knew this book was required reading. And for my Canada-Alaska reading goal in 2018, it counts for a territory in Canada I hadn't touched yet - Nunavut.

Any of the facts I'm spouting about the author and the background to these stories comes from this excellent interview with her from the CBC.

I felt like these stories were different and wanted to understand why. Dunning had been writing for years and shoving her stories into a drawer. She said a lot of Inuit authors write but are afraid of their stories being colonized. She first thought to look into publishing after reading an anthropologist's take on the Inuit, and her reaction was, "Why is it that aboriginal women are never in charge of their own sexuality? Why are we presented as women who can be used? So that's where Annie came from — what inspired her was getting mad."

And there is definitely a theme of women owning their sexuality in these stories. These are not from American or Canadian sensibility, and I really appreciated that peek into the world.

When the author talks about being a Southern Canadian Inuk, she means anything south of official Inuit territories. The story "Annie Muktuk" is set in Churchill, Manitoba, which is the "polar bear capital of the world" (and you can see in this feature by Google Maps. Her mother was born in Whale Cove, Nunavut, although she herself did not grow up there. (Check out this interactive Inuit Nunangat Map from the Indigenous and Native Affairs Office in Canada.)

Some of the stories go back farther in time, and some are present-day. One is based on stories she heard about her grandfather while others are based in her own life. She's giving the name "story" but feels the majority are stories she has been told. Many of them include the same characters and are linked together, but not all.

Themes include survival, sexuality, family, Inuit vs. white people (these are usually hilarious), mythology and magic, and more. There's so much in the 200 pages, I can see why I've seen this so highly recommended. I loved it.

View all my reviews