I posted this on FB but may as well put it here where books are the theme. By request, here is a list of the books I most enjoyed reading last year:

-The Inquisitor's Tale by Adam Gidwitz and Hatem Aly. This is a YA book I read to my son, set in France in the year 1242. It was creative and funny and smart and I enjoyed it probably even more than he did.
-The Reader by Bernhard Schlink. A novel that poses the fascinating question of how to handle bearing witness to atrocity, and whether one can do so and remain innocent. An odd read but it stayed in my thoughts a long time afterward.
-Under the North Star by Vaino Linna. As Mahfouz is to Egypt, Linna is to Finland. This one is the story of a village leading up to the revolution against Russia in the early 20th century.
-Life on Mars by Linda McNulty. Weird and wacky stories with magic realism elements, like Rushdie in Canada, with a lot of fun wordplay.
-Advocate by Darren Greer. A novel about the (fictional) first AIDS case in small-town Nova Scotia. Poignant and powerful.
-One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovych by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Classic gulag short novel, the first overt criticism of Stalin to be accepted by Russian authorities. But the uneasy relationships among the prisoners, each facing the same hopeless situation with dry humour, was what made it a great piece of writing.
-Willem De Kooning's Paintbrush by Kerry Lee Powell. Punchy stories about punchy, crazy people wheeling and dealing to stay afloat. Amazing writer.
-The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy. This is another one that I think is as much a story of a place (India) as it is about the individuals in it. She's got a gift for voice and perspective.
-Best Canadian Stories 2017. They picked the "best" ones (so very subjective), and several of them are indeed really, really good.
-Peninsula Sinking by David Huebert. Short stories about animals and people in Nova Scotia. One story, "Limousines," about dairy farmers, is one of my favourite short stories ever.