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How I Pick What to Read Next

23 Tuesday Jun 2026

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In a world of algorithms and Goodreads, how does a person pick what to read next? Since creating my own website in 2011 to write things I’ve also used it to track what books I’ve read. But the following describes what tends to guide me in what to read next.

I’ve had two editors named “T” who got me onto excellent books. The first, Tathagata Bhattacharya, is a novelist himself who comes from a distinguished line of writers. His father is the great Bengali radical novelist Nabarun Bhattacharya, and his grandmother is Mahasweta Devi, a legendary writer and activist famous across India and beyond. T got me onto Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate and also Yeshar Kemal’s novels, The Wind from the Plain, Memed, My Hawk, and They Burn the Thistles. It’s easy to read T’s novel, General Firebrand and His Red Atlas, and feel his love for both Vasily Grossman and his father’s works.

T’s wife is also a dear friend of mine, Nila Bhowmick, and her non-fiction books–How Not To Be a Superwoman and Lies Our Mother Told Us: The Indian Woman’s Burden–are brilliant. I’m excited to read her upcoming novel.

My second editor T, Tyler, got me into Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666. I’ll forever be indebted to him for this. Today we have a book club featuring just that book, ie we talk about 2666 whenever we hang out. He also loves Martin Amis’ Times Arrow, which absolutely floored me, and Hemingway. Maybe because of him I read The Sun Also Rises. Some Morley Callaghan stories, too. He got me into Point Omega by DeLillo.

Another friend and ex colleague, André Forget, an excellent novelist in his own right too, also guided me to me several excellent novelists. JK Huysmans, Goncharov, and Gaddis. His love for Orhan Pamuk pushed me to read The Black Book, an excellent novel. Against Nature, Oblomov, and The Recognitions are all masterpieces. I had read Pamuk earlier, The Snow, and quite liked it.

I have a recollection of Tathagata praising Kemal far above Pamuk, but I spoke to him more recently and he quite loves them both. I associate my two friends with each of these legendary Turkish authors.

Andre’s novel In The City of Pigs was truly excellent. It floored me! Not just because it was set in Toronto and felt familiar in theme and content. He’s friends with some outstanding contemporary novelists I doubt I would have otherwise found: Noor Naga, If An Egyptian Cannot Speak English, Fawn Parker’s Hi, It’s Me and What We Both Know, and Naben Ruthnum’s A Hero Of Our Time, and his body-horror novella, Helpmeet. Naga, Parker, and Forget were all longlisted for the Giller, while Ruthnum was outrageously snubbed.

I’ve often thought, “surely there must be outstanding contemporary novelists, I wonder who they are!” and I’m obliged to Andre for helping to answer this. I’m very confident in recommending any of these writers to anybody. Andre also edited After Realism, a great, gutsy collection of contemporary literature.

My darling Amanda directed me to The Shadow of the Wind, A Night To Remember, and many other cool non-fiction books. Friends in India put me onto Ambedkar and essayists like Khushwant Singh. Doug Miller at Miller Books got me reading Lethem and Auster, two very cool, impressive writers.

Sometimes I consult my favourite dead novelists by reading what they love. My love for Bolaño has got me to read more Bolaño than 2666 or Savage Detectives, but also his favourite works, like Don Quixote and Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar. Next I plan to read another dear love of his, Nicanor Parra.  

I’ve also read some Pablo Neruda because Bolaño doesn’t like him and I wanted to see why, for my own curiousity and to better understand By Night in Chile. The truth is, the Neruda I read I really loved. Sorry, Roberto! I’m sure I’ll learn more about your distaste for Neruda’s poetry and politics and come to see your point of view, but meantime, I found the language sadly very dazzling and beautiful. I wanted to dislike him, but it turns out the poet many said was the 20th century’s best is in my opinion very good.

Years ago I met a contemporary writer, Daniel Perry, through a mutual friend, and his work is excellent. I loved his short story collections, Hamburger and Nobody Looks That Young Here, and his recent novella Modern Folklore is outstanding. Along the same lines, Sofi Papamarko’s short stories Radium Girl was great.

Sometimes friends who aren’t novelists or my editor recommend books to me and I’ve been led to excellent works that way. That’s how I found Cloud Atlas and A Brief History of Seven Killings.  

Of course, there’s always Vladimir Nabokov as guide. His literary lectures on Russian and European authors is an incredible way to find great novels and have an absolute genius by your side as a literary companion. I read Dickens’ Bleak House, Proust, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Kafka, and of course my dearly beloved Nikolai Gogol this way. Reading literary criticism about a difficult text can be a wonderful motivator to read it. For years I’ve had Nabokov’s lectures on Don Quixote on my shelf, and finally got to read that because of Bolaño .

My dad really loved JM Coetzee, Disgrace, and so did I. He loves Maugham and maybe I’ll read that soon. I told myself I would.

So long as you love what you read, there’s probably no bad way to get recommended books. I’ll just say that sometimes you don’t know what you need next, and trusting an algorithm to reverse-engineer a list for you based on what you’ve read already may be looking backwards instead of forwards. It may very well direct you to books you enjoy, but there’s a type of book it won’t put in your hands, and that’s the kind of book I’ve been chasing. Sometimes I wonder if satisfaction comes in higher tiers we don’t know about yet, and can’t dream up until we do. Then again, YouTube directed me years ago to Alice Coltrane.

Sometimes, knowing a book has delighted someone I know and trust helps me read it, in the way a joke is genuinely funnier when you hear a friend laugh at it. Friends and writers I admire have no commercial ulterior motive and I know they’re suggeseting a book because it means something to them, even if I don’t end up loving it. In a way, reading a friend’s favourite is like holding a three-way conversation. I wonder if American literature has an outsized impression on me, but even so, maybe I’ll read Gass, Vollman and John Williams soon. Maybe Clarice Lispector. I mostly use Twitter now to connect with like-minded readers and music fans, and these writers are popular there. Technology can be a useful tool if used correctly. It all comes down to people in the end.

Book Review: In the City of Pigs, by André Forget

19 Tuesday Jul 2022

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Cover of In the City of Pigs, Dundurn Press, June 2022

Finally, we get Forget’s debut novel. It was no disappointment! Forget knows a thing or two about Canadian literature—the former editor in chief of The Puritan also has a Master’s of English with a focus on CanLit. I only mention this to say he knows what traditional pitfalls to avoid.

In April 2022, Forget released a collection of short stories he edited and compiled called After Realism, “24 short stories for the 21st century.” Whatever you expect upon hearing the dreaded phrase “CanLit,” you will get something different when you read In the City of Pigs.

Cover of After Realism, Vehicule Press, April 2022

Forget’s protagonist Alexander Otzakov navigates the semi-secret world of Toronto Money, which uses art as a mask in various ways, most notably to make itself seem noble and high-minded while committing shady deals. In the City of Pigs explores this literally and figuratively. ICP is refreshingly frank about sex and money in a way Toronto is not known for. What is really behind the large art grants? What is the nature of the grease that makes property deals work? Most profoundly and practically: does anybody who lives in the city even care?

The literal strain is the plot, which is straightforward, but I won’t reveal here to avoid spoilers. But the novel’s heart explores the relationship between art and money by asking what art really is. Forget is hardly the first author to ask, but his answers avoid debut-novel cliches, and are smart enough to make the novel essential reading, if for no other reason.

I suspect what people are liable to call “digressions” in my view is the novel’s meat and potatoes. No useful answer about the relationship between money and art can come from someone who doesn’t understand art, and Forget leaves his reader with no doubt about his grasp of the subject.

There are lengthy discussions about, for example, an underwater organ that makes the reader consider not only what hearing music really is but what seeing music is like, ie, pipes playing Bach underwater releasing air bubbles in certain patterns that render music visible. I happen to have read Pynchon’s Against the Day before reading this novel, and was reminded of Pynchon’s wonderful “digressions” about transmitting radio waves and other signals through the aether.

“God is the throbbing hum of an inhumanly low frequency, a bass note that sustains the universe,” is a sentence I’ll quote here for two reasons. I love it. Also, it describes Bootsy Collins’ role in Parliament Funkadelic so well. There’s no mention of funk in this novel, but great novels make you think of other unrelated things and tie them together. The novel’s in-depth discussions of classical music were joyful, even or especially when they were over my head.

The novel’s title comes from Plato by way of a fictional art group that launches guerilla events in abandoned buildings in the city. Without getting into the particulars, this is a novel that juxtaposes Plato, Toronto arts societies, Faust, Mozart, Toronto gentry, and gentrification. Local staples like The Communist’s Daughter abound.

For one thing, it references Dundas West and Norm MacDonald. It’s set in Toronto and Halifax, two cities I lived in. The protagonist is a former-musician, so dialogue brims with strong opinions and scathing judgements, two things always fun.

Perhaps the novel may be described as an apolitical look at political power via art. It’s also about love, sex, and money. It’s a broad novel I don’t mean to reduce narrowly. It’s about thinking and living.

The wealthy power brokers are treated fairly, which is to say the state of inner-life and creativity in their soul is not ignored while their deeds and machinations are described accurately. The loathing is earned, not pre-determined. The moral and artistic world of this novel may have exacting standards, but it gives everyone a chance!

Perhaps the best observation is that what seems like flagrantly corrupt business deals and cynical co-opting of art is something the general public will simply not give a shit about. When it comes to how business is really conducted, the public is as apathetic towards it as it is about serious art.

The novel’s highbrow strains are high, but Forget’s head is refreshingly not up his ass. Joyce responded to critics’ accusations Ulysses was inaccessible by pointing out that his characters were mostly poor. Bloom tabulates his day’s expenses at the novel’s end, and Otzakov looks for an affordable place to live. It is a very grounded novel.

There are tender, truthful moments where people discuss the full dimensions of their relationships in ways that echo Mordecai Richler in Barney’s Version. It’s funny and frank about unsavoury instincts and impulses that balance the highbrow chatter.

Forget takes on Toronto’s tendency to praise itself for being polite enough to avoid discussing how real power and money really work, while talking about much else along the way in novel ways, from booze to drugs and more. There are parties and pities aplenty.

It refreshingly explores whether the very idea of art is rarified, indulgent, useless shit in today’s age of ascending maga fascism just as intensely as it looks at the connection between art and commerce. In other words, the perspective comes from a deep desire for knowledge, honesty, and concern for people.

Without reducing an artistic, imaginative work to a didactic social novel, Forget recalls Michael Brooks’ edict to be ruthless to systems and kind to people. The “power” he explores here is not about a particular political party or easy satire of a specific corporation or industry. But about the interlocking systems we all operate within, albeit from very different positions and heights.

The moth just wants to move towards the light because that is the moth’s nature. “I’m the moth, you’re the moth…”

Forget understands that human nature may be constant in regards to this system, but not everybody needs to find somewhere to live. Moths may all be drawn to light, but some are flying in a podiatrist’s office while others are in Rosedale.