November Reading

and my Book of the Month pick!

Dec 01, 2025

This is my monthly wrap up where I talk about some of my favourite things from the last month. What I’m reading, enjoying, looking forward to—sort of anything floating my boat.

Here is an overview of how my month went:

I am moving to London at the end of December—sorry if this feels like insane lore drop, I didn’t know how to talk about it and now I waited too long—so life has been hectic…
Packing, selling and donating your entire life away is an interesting exercise (don’t recommend)
Got two poems published in The Dalhousie Review’s latest issue!!
Really fun to see my kooky bits out in the world
Went to the Spruceton Inn for the 2025 Artist Residency ☺️
It was a lovely week in the woods with fellow artists, and I wrote a ton in a new project!
Went to NYC for a week as a last hurrah of an East Coast staple
Published a conversation I had with David Szalay, the winner of the 2025 The Booker Prizes, which you can read here:
In Conversation With David Szalay
Nic Marna
·
November 14, 2025
Read full story
Did I mention I’m moving to London?

What I Read

Below is a rundown of every book I read last month. I’ll be adding a star next to my standouts, like a starred review where a star isn’t a 1 to 5 scale, it just means good!

Before the written ramblings, here is a video version of my monthly wrap up if you’re more of a visual person:

The Idea of an Entire Life: Poems by Billy-Ray Belcourt ★

This is the only book I read while I was at the Spruceton Residency, despite bringing 8 books for the week. Everything else I cracked open felt like it was taking away from the experience, but reading Belcourt’s poetry every morning added to it.

In poetry and in prose, Billy-Ray Belcourt’s writing feels like a breeze swishing through hair. It has a shimmery quality that really inspires me. The subject matter here is indigeneity, queerness, being an artist, pain, hope, life. He also speaks urgently to a desire for love and partnership and sex.

Fiction has a certain allure to me. Form and content so rarely nourish one another in real life. When I’m writing a novel, it seems the reader is a fish I’m trying to transport in a small, clear bag back to the river.
p. 35, The Idea of an Entire Life

Poetry doesn’t always resonate with me, but this does everything I want the form to do: make me feel, convince me I should never write another sentence again, inspire me to write many many more sentences.

We Do Not Part by Han Kang (tr. by E. Yaewon & Paige Aniyah Morris)★

This was the perfect winter read. Despite the difficult subject matter, I loved feeling like I was wrapped in these lives for a short while.

It follows Kyungha, a writer still reeling from the experience of writing her last book, as she answers a distressing call for help from an old friend. She’s tasked with rescuing a pet bird from an empty home on Jeju Island. Her trek is a snowy mess and, when she arrives, things devolve very quickly into a dreamlike spiral through memory.

Han Kang has this gorgeous way of writing from a perspective of nuance when it comes to history. She writes lovingly about the country she calls home, but excavates its violent and horrific past. In We Do Not Part, this happens through Kyungha getting a first-hand account of the Jeju massacre. We get these snippets that are reminiscent of her friend’s documentary films, and also question the place of the artist in recounting tragic events—something I’m sure Kang herself wrestles with.

This novel concluded my Year With Han Kang, a year where I read all her novels translated into English. I’ll have more thoughts to share on this exercise in a later post, so stay tuned! For now, I’ll just say I loved this one.

The Seas by Samantha Hunt

This was such a peculiar novel, and it really left an interesting taste in my mouth. It’s experimental, poetic, and feels like a fever dream that we’re let in on.

It’s a slippery story of a girl who lives in a chilly seaside town with her mother and a big chasm her late father used to occupy. The novel unfolds in vignettes throughout her life and focuses on her relationship with a much older man who’s an alcoholic veteran from the Iraq war. She’s also convinced she’s a mermaid, and not the Ariel kind. We ebb and flow through her musings on her love, her family and her father.

The reader is slightly removed from plot here. It’s written in a way that makes the story feel just out of reach, but that really worked for me! I felt like I was trying to see it through water or trying to get a grip on Jell-O. Stylistically, it reminded me of Samantha Schweblin and Julia Armfield and Melissa Broder (I think Hunt is on the moodboard of many modern writers given that this was published in 2004).

I don’t think it’s going to be for everyone, but I really enjoyed it. I’ll be looking into the rest of her novels.

Pick a Colour by Souvankham Thammavongsa

This novel just won the Giller Prize for excellence in Canadian writing, so I was so glad to be able to fit it in before packing away all my books for the Big Move™️.

It recounts 24 hours in the shoes of a woman working at a nail salon. Her life there is anonymous: She adopts a generic pseudonym, cycles through clients mechanically, and tries to blend in with the rest of her colleagues. Underneath the incorrect name-tag is a person, a life, an immigrant noticing the way she is treated and has to navigate the world.

Pick a Colour is a satire of the immigrant experience, this flattened, nameless existence. I found that part of it very effective. The interactions feel real, like they could be happening just down the street (and they probably are). There’s comedy in being in the worker’s chair, getting to know what’s being said behind the backs of the customers. And there’s also a twinge in knowing what side of that interaction you’ve likely been on before.

It was clear to me while reading this that Thammavongsa is a very talented short story writer. The book reads like a single short story or many short stories mashed together. This isn’t a bad thing, it’s just something I’ve found myself thinking about a lot recently.

This is sharp and short, and I highly recommend it.

Disappoint Me by Nicola Dinan ★

I put off reading this for a long long time because Dinan’s first novel, Bellies, raised the bar for what to expect from contemporary fiction. There was this infectious amalgamation of modernity and depth and humour and heart, and anything less than that for her follow up would’ve made me very sad. Luckily, this was another hit for me.

This novel follows two people—Max, a trans woman, and Vincent, a straight cis man—as they start dating. Their worlds collide, their pasts are uncovered to each other, and with each peel of an onion layer things become more complicated. Dinan tackles so much through these two POVs: the cost of transition on the body, artists with survival jobs, morality in the face of someone you love having a sorted past. Race, class, identity, it all gets unpacked with the sharpest of pens here.

One of the most brilliant parts of this for me was the examination of queer people in the face of heteronormativity. It is so bold, it doesn’t shy away from the nuance of its appeal mixed with the uneasy feeling that comes with self-erasure. Can you be happy without paying a price?

I will read anything Dinan writes. She is the blueprint, she is the north star. I can’t wait to read Bellies again.

Eyes of Gaza by Plestia Alaqad

This is a mix of memoir and reportage from a young journalist living through the latest genocide in Gaza. It’s an important read that doesn’t shy away from the realities of the experience.

It’s very hard to review this kind of memoir, it’s diaristic and honest. She talks about the weight of responsibility as a journalist clashing with her heavy heart as a Palestinian girl. Watching the place she loves fall apart violently and fearing for her life every second, while also feeling a sense of duty to share the truth of what was happening.

There’s really no reason to apply a critical eye here, it’s simply a feat of strength to have the foresight to document and now share it with the world. There are also bits of poetry sprinkled throughout, which was beautiful to see—like hope in the face of all the destruction.

The Empusium by Olga Tokarczuk (tr. Antonia Lloyd-Jones)

Olga Tokarczuk writes the strangest, most daring books. This story is no different, but much like the last book I read from her, I feel the need to re-read it now that I have the full context.

On the surface, The Empusium is about the men at a health resort/sanatorium in the middle of the mountains in Poland in the early 1900s. We follow them as the undergo treatment, coexist with one another, eat, drink, debate, and do it all over again the next day. There is also a looming horror woven in since, every year, people from the town turn up dead.

Each character is revealed to us as the story moves forward, and all of them are awful. This was, of course, intentional, but the middle section of this novel felt like a slog because of the series of long walks with horrible men discussing the inferiority of women. I felt like the building tension with the horror was often undercut by the meandering.

The last 50 pages are an absolute wild ride, and I wasn’t prepared for it. Tokarczuk keeps the reader hooked right up to the acknowledgements, which explain most of the decisions she made throughout the story. It was a brilliant thought exercise that she ran across the finish line and then some.

On My Bedside Table

We’re doing things a little differently this month because this dispatch is sponsored by Book of the Month!

As a picky mood-reader who thinks about books a lot, I think I have a pretty good handle on what I want to read next. But the Book of the Month picks are always getting me to add things to my TBR. Buzzy litfic, interest-piquing thrillers, and more, means I can count on them to find a book for me.

Before I Forget by Tory Henwood Hoen is about a twenty-something woman who feels stuck. She doesn’t know how to move forward, so she goes backwards. After nearly a decade of estrangement, she returns to the home where she grew up to take care of her father, who is slowly slipping away due to Alzheimer’s.
It’s a late coming-of-age (something I absolutely love) literary fiction about family, healing, memory, and the things that hold us back.

You can click here to join me and get your first Book of the Month book for just $5 and a free hat of your choosing with the code ‘HOLLY’!

What did you read and love in November?!

Tell me what you think in the comments!

That’s been my month! Typos (if any) were made on purpose.

Until next time 🤠