The Dusty Bookcase: The Three Best Reads of 2025 (two are in print!)

29 December 2025

The Three Best Reads of 2025 (two are in print!)

An annus horribilis, wouldn't you say? Strange, too, in that I've never expected to fly the flag Greenland at our small Upper Canadian home.

This has also been a strange twelve months for the Dusty Bookcase in that two of this year's top three reads are actually in print:

Douglas Durkin's 1930 novel Mr. Gumble Sits Up, reviewed here in 2012, irritated so much that a full thirteen years passed before I got around to The Magpie; this despite having been given a copy by a reader of this blog. He recommended it, suggesting it as the Great Canadian Post-Great War Novel. I think he's right.

First published in 1923 by Hodder & Stoughton, it's currently available here from Invisible Publishing.

Related to Durkin, quite literally, is future wife Martha Ostenso and her award-winning 1925 novel Wild Geese.

Was Durkin the co-author? Evidence more than suggests so.

Will we ever know the extent of his contribution? I expect so.

Do I want to get into it? No, I do not.

Aging copies of the 2008 New Canadian Library edition are still available for purchase from Penguin Random House. The cover, an abomination, was clearly created by someone who knew nothing about the novel. Who signed off on it?

Reuben Ship's The Investigator, a 1956 adaptation of his two-year-old radio play of the same name, rounds out the top three best reads. I enjoyed this book more than any other read this year. It made me laugh, and is as relevant a commentary on American politics as it was seven decades ago.

If I could revive just one of the out-of-print books read this year, The Investigator would be it. However, tradition dictates I select another two books deserving a return to print. And so:

A case can be made for The Salt-Box, her Leacock award-winning 1951 debut, but I consider A View of the Town (1954) to be Jan Hilliard's first true novel. It concerns a the approaching sesquicentenary of a Nova Scotia town and the rivalry between the heads of its founding families. The lightest of the novelist's five novels, should it also have won the Leacock? It was up against Joan Walker's Pardon My Parka, which I aim to read next year.

I'll let you know.

Winnifred Eaton's second novel as "Onoto Watanna" – her second novel overall – A Japanese Nightingale (1901) was the Montreal author's big commercial breakthrough, I liked it a lot, and was surprised to find that it had not been part of the wave of things Eaton – Winnifred and sister Edith – that swept through academe in the decades spanning the fin de millénaire.

Returning to the in print, two more titles figure. The first is The Weird World of Wes Beattie (1963), the first book read and reviewed this year.

Had it not been for the good folks at New York publishers Felony and Mayhem, this bit of fun would've made it to the list of three books most dervering of a return to print. That said, I do wish F&M would stop pushing The Weird World of Wes Beattie as "The First Truly CANADIAN Mystery."

It is nowhere close.

Stephen Leacock's Arcadian Adventures of the Idle Rich (1914) is still in print. The fifteen-year-old copies New Canadian Library edition sitting in the Penguin Random House warehouse have a better cover than Wild Geese.

I recommend the Tecumseh Press Canadian Critical Edition edition edited by D.M.R. Bentley.

Finally, we have Charles G.D. Roberts' The Heart of the Ancient Wood (1900). This was was the most disappointing read of the year, but only because I remembered liking it so much as a young golden blonde university student. This old grizzled guy saw it quite differently.

The Heart of the Ancient Wood is in print today as part of the the Formac Fiction Treasures series.

The Investigator aside, it's no great shame that the rest are out of print. Robert G. Collin's Tolerable Levels of Violence (1983) was interesting for its depiction of a dystopian North America in which law and order has collapsed. It stands in stark contrast with Rev Hugh Pedley's Looking Forward (1913), which imagines a futuristic near-Utopian Canada brought about by the unification of most Christian denominations. Expo 67 obsessives – I'm one! – will want to hunt down copies of A Fair Affair (1967), Paul Champagne's lone novel.

Regrets? Well, I was looking forward to reading They Have Bodies, the 1925 debut novel by Barney Allen (aka Sol Allen), but somehow misplaced my copy. I found it only a few days ago.

Resolutions, by which I mean reading resolutions, I have but one. Since 2009, when I began this journey through Canada's forgotten, neglected and suppressed writing, I've read and reviewed 460 books, barely thirty percent of which were penned by women.

In the New Year, I'll be reading and reviewing books by women only. No male authors. Barney Allen will have to wait.

Should be interesting.

I'm looking forward to it.

Wishing you all a Happy New Year. I'm confident that it will be happier one.

Really, I am.