K.R. Wilson's 3 favorite reads in 2024

• 2023
• 2024

Each Sean Michaels novel is a wondrous creature unto itself. In Do You Remember Being Born?, an eminent poet agrees—for a fee large enough to help her son buy a house—to write a lengthy poem in collaboration with a generative AI. In an innovative act of living the theme, the novel itself is written in (very limited, carefully managed) collaboration with a customized poetry-generation AI, which produces the fictional AI’s contributions and dialogue and discrete bits of the narrative. (In an admirable act of authorial transparency, these are highlighted in the text.)
It works splendidly. Not necessarily because of the role of the actual AI in creating it—though that’s a fascinating and successful experiment/conceit—but because Michaels is such a fine writer, with a strong sense of narrative and character and exquisite attention to detail. The result is not only a timely and engaging read, but also a rich exploration of the nature—and sometimes the cost—of literary creativity.

A woman alone in a cabin. Isolated by choice. The sounds of her breath, her chair. The creak of her floorboards. Her wired jaw now unwired, but still. The tiny red light of her camera in the dark.

Meghan Greeley’s short novel Jawbone is remarkable. Truly, genuinely remarkable. As in singular. Arresting. Unique. As in written in language so tangible you could be bathing in it.

It has a plot, of course. A good one, an important one, about misunderstandings and the pain people cause and a contest for a trip to Mars. But the breathtaking scenery is at least as significant as the route the path takes

Brett—stalled in Barrie, Ontario on her tentative way toward whatever the rest of her life might be—keeps her head down and her shoulders taut, clearing brush and dead animals from rural roadsides and relieving her stresses with her much younger musician boyfriend. Then one day there’s bleeding.

Susan Wadds’ novel What the Living Do tracks Brett’s life as she wrestles with an unexpected diagnosis, an unsettling past, and an uncertain future. Its stunningly good prose embeds us in Brett’s sensory world (her doctor “wiggles his fingers into blue stretchy gloves and lets the cuffs snap”) and in the fraught dynamics of her relationships. It’s a book to savour for its language and to remember for the raw, flawed humanity of its characters.