It’s time to ring in a new year1 and say goodbye to the old! As I have the honour2 of writing the final Hot Off the Shelf post of 2022, I thought it’d be nice to have all the HOTS writers share their top three reads for the year. Or, to be more accurate: their top two reads for the year and then an open category for the 3rd, so long as it’s available at VPL. One of us chose a book, two chose albums, and one chose a game3. We also have a special Editor’s Choice category from our lead, Heather.
To make this more interesting than a simple list of items4 I followed up my colleagues’ choices with some questions, the answers to which you’ll find below. Like an answer, but want some follow-up? Ask in the comments! We’re all going to be monitoring this.
Along with each writer’s choices and answers to the questions, you’ll be getting my first thoughts on seeing/researching each title to help inform where my questions came from5.
There are a few reasons why I look forward to the month of December. The holidays, the time spent with family, the time spent at home… and looking at the best of the best from the past year! Once the beginning of the month hits, I start scouring my favourite magazines, websites, and cultural sources to see their yearly round-ups and find out what I might have missed. If you’re a movie or music lover, it’s a bit easier to stay caught up over the course of the year, or to quickly catch up later. But book lovers, like us, have it a bit harder. I’m sure we can all agree that to read a book is a solid commitment that takes just a bit longer than a movie – or even a movie trilogy. To have read all the top books of any given year you need to never choose a book ‘incorrectly’ or read only books from this current year – no time to catch up on last year!
Instead, I like to take a more leisurely approach, and choose my reading material based on what interests me at the time (or whatever the monthly Reading Challenge is). But once December rolls round, you can look at summaries of the year, and choose your reading material based on that. Even better, the holds lists will have gone down and you’re more likely to get the book you want, when you want it.
So with that in mind, our December Reading Challenge is simple – read a book published in 2022! It doesn’t even need to be one of the ‘best books of the year’ (since that is of course very personal and contentious anyways). But if you do want to read something that’s been deemed the best book of the year you have lots of lists to guide your choices.
I’m partial to the NPR Book Concierge, which doesn’t discriminate based on genre and lets you mix and match appeal factors as they recommend one of 403 books published in 2023. For example, if you’re looking for ‘Book Club Ideas’ that are ‘Eye-Opening Reads’ and about ‘Identity and Culture’, the NPR Book Concierge recommends you read Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo, among other choices. This is the Zimbabwean author’s second novel – and her second to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize as well. It’s a fictionalized send-up of the fall of Mugabe, set in an animal kingdom called Jidada. As you can imagine, it’s sort of a folk or fairy tale in the style of Animal Farm. It’s relentlessly satirical but also heartbreaking at times, as you read about reality for the average person living under this totalitarian regime. Other books recommended by the NPR Book Concierge includes Olga Dies Dreaming by Xochitl Gonzalez and Yinka, Where Is your Huzband? by Lizzie Damilola Blackburn.
I always find literary translated works fascinating, not only because they offer us a spectacular window to look into different cultures around the globe and inspire us with fresh stories and insights crafted by the world’s literary masterminds, but also because the challenging translation process amazes me. It always appears impossible to me to translate novels and poetry. Not to mention the nuances of cultural differences and historical contexts that can add to the subtleties of meanings and complicate the translation, the text alone is tricky enough to tackle, since each language has its own system—different grammatical rules, various syntactic possibilities, unique sounds and rhythm … there are always untranslatable words that no exact English words to match the meaning with.
Given these challenges, most translators agree that direct translation may be impossible and the focus of translation should be on conveying the intention and meaning of the text. And make an effort to preserve (or recreate) the melody in the original work. As Frank Wynne, the award-winning literary translator and the chair of the 2022 International Booker Prize judging panel, put it, “… at a theoretical level, everything is impossible to translate, so it’s just a question of how to render the impossible … Meaning is crucial to all translations, but even the translation of very standard conversation involves rhythm and cadence …”
It is clear that the translator’s refined skill in both the original and target language is critical to the success of translation. While not always possible to capture everything in the author’s voice, style, and wordplay, seasoned translators aim to balance between staying faithful to the original work and creating something as unique and provoking as the original. Frank continued to explain, “There may be cultural references that are clear to the original reader but may not be clear to the target reader; you need to make a decision as to whether you need to gloss the reference, or simply leave it there and allow the reader to do the work, look it up, or whatever … If there is a hilariously funny passage in the original, it’s your job as a translator to make sure it’s hilariously funny in translation, and that will frequently mean changing every single word, because the chance that the same words will have the same effect in a different language is almost nil—even when they are related languages.”
