To briefly sum up some of my reading highlights in 2011, here are the winners in a few categories, with my brief Goodreads reviews attached (and if you want to see everything I read in 2011, you can check out my 2011 Reading Challenge bookshelf on Goodreads – and you can friend me over there, too):

Best New Book (published in 2011): Half-Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan

This book easily and thoroughly swept me up in its magic, transporting me directly into the times and places inhabited by its characters. Despite a few slower sections, the story was incredibly compelling and kept me on my toes right until the very end. The characters were excellently realized and although the period/cultural slang was a bit off-putting in the beginning, it quickly became very natural and definitely helped to immerse me in the story.

Best YA Book: The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie and When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead (tie)

Fascinating YA read for young adults and adults alike. Alexie’s characterization of Junior is flawless and engaging, and the story’s exploration of both race issues and the struggles of growing up is just as messy and compelling as real life. Really great read, and I look forward to reading more of Alexie’s books.

Absolutely fantastic book. A delight to read and incredibly enjoyable to try to unravel its very clever mystery. If you loved Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time as a kid (I know I did!), you definitely must read this. Its plot is integral to When You Reach Me, but Stead’s book is still extremely charming and clever even if you have no knowledge of its related predecessor. I read a lot of YA, but this is definitely one of the very best books of that genre that I’ve read in a while.

Best Canadian Book: The Incident Report by Martha Baillie

The concept of this novel was brilliant and expertly executed. Don’t for a second think that the storytelling might be limited by the incident report style – quite the opposite, in fact. Baillie’s prose is beautiful and detailed as she intertwines reports from her love life, her past, and actual library interactions. A quick and engaging read that you’ll easily gobble up.

Best Short Story Collection: Once by Rebecca Rosenblum

Such a wonderful debut collection of stories. Rebecca Rosenblum is all at once self-assured and tentative, harsh and tender. A captivating look at human relationships. I’m really looking forward to reading her new collection, The Big Dream.

And because I love stats, here’s a few key stats I pulled out from my 2011 reading list:

Fiction: 44
Non-Fiction: 6

Female Author: 36
Male Author: 14

Canadian Author: 28
Non-Canadian Author: 22

Adult Book: 30
YA/Kids Book: 20

Paperback/Hardcover: 33
E-Book: 17

As for 2012, I still have a goal of reading 50 books (and you can follow my 2012 Reading Challenge on Goodreads, too – I’m still currently on book #1, Come, Thou Tortoise by Jessica Grant), but I’m not sure if I should try to put any other structures around my to-read list. I want to continue reading at least 50% Canadian authors (I was at 56% in 2011), and I enjoyed reading 40% YA/Kids books last year. Looking at my stats, I feel like I should increase my non-fiction reading, but I rarely feel the pull towards non-fiction, like I do towards fiction.

What were some of your favourite reads in 2011? And what are your reading goals for 2012?

I’d really like to give this book a 4.5 rating, to be honest. I use the word “honest” because that’s what this book is: brutally, brutally honest. While I wasn’t thrilled with the ending and thought it was a bit too neat and tidy, this book kept me completely engaged from beginning to end. The characters were fantastically created and I feel like I’ll be seeing them randomly on the street, just like main character Tom Violet does with the characters in the novel he’s writing throughout the book. I was actually somewhat surprised by how engaged I was by this book, thinking that it might be too much of a stereotypical “guy” book for me, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Norman’s style is very Nick Hornby-esque, and thus will be easily loved by men and women alike, even if his books continue to open with awkward chapters about erectile dysfunction! Laugh-out-loud funny and extremely relatable, I highly recommend this debut novel and look forward to more from the author.

View my Goodreads profile to read more of my reviews or add me as a friend!
Thanks to NetGalley and Harper Perennial for the review copy!

Lemon

I didn’t really know what to expect when I started reading Lemon, my first foray into Cordelia Strube‘s oeuvre, even though Lemon is her eighth novel. The plot seemed like one I’d read before, yet it intrigued me nonetheless: misfit teenage girl with the odds stacked against her attempts to get out of high school in one piece. But upon reading the first few chapters, I quickly realized that Lemon herself was a far more complex and interesting character than any plot summary could have explained to me. Lemon buries herself in classic literature while complaining about the weak women within these tales. Lemon spends her spare time volunteering at a local hospital and creating a strong sisterly relationship with a young girl with cancer. Lemon truly doesn’t want to fit into the oversexed, overviolenced world of adulthood and doesn’t understand why her peers are so desperate to age themselves. And when you see the world through Lemon’s eyes, you’ll wonder why you were once so anxious to grow up, too.

Strube does a fantastic job of writing in the voice of a teenage misfit as she deals with difficult issues ranging from gang violence, to rape, to cancer, to dysfunctional families. While a few scenes are undeniably disturbing and painful to witness, the opportunity Strube gives us to view our world through a fresh new lens makes this book an incredibly worthwhile read. Lemon will punch you in the gut and rip your heart out, and yet somehow, you’ll be a better person because of it.

Links:
Buy Lemon on Amazon.ca
Check out more reviews of Lemon on Goodreads

(photo by bookgrl)

Once a popular sweet ending to a child’s birthday party, the standard Betty Crocker chocolate cupcake with rainbow sprinkles has recently undergone a massive makeover. Specialty cupcake shops now create beautiful (and delicious!) works of art with ingredients as exotic as lavender and matcha tea powder for celebrity customers such as Ringo Starr and Katie Holmes (and little Suri!).

As a self-proclaimed cupcake connoisseur, I perform taste tests at cupcake shops in every city I visit, I read cupcake blogs regularly, and I even bake my own cupcakes from scratch. The worldwide popularity of cupcakes has touched down in Toronto with more than a dozen “cupcakeries” in the downtown area alone. But where are the best places to go when you’re in need of a mini-cake fix? Read on for my four favourite cupcake spots in T.O.

Life Is Sweet (2328 Queen St E, 416.698.0555)

Subtitled “A Cupcake House”, this small east-end bakery offers a wide variety of delicious and unique flavours daily. For $2.25 per cupcake, you can choose from flavours such as Vanilla Bean, Chocolate, Mint Chocolate, Lemon Drop, Butterscotch, Earl Grey, Orange, Chocolate Chip, Coconut, and White Chocolate. On my visit I chose to try both a Chocolate and a Mint Chocolate Cupcake, and I couldn’t have been more satisfied. The cake was light, fluffy, and oh-so-chocolatey, and the lovely employees freshly piped the divine icing onto the cupcakes while I watched!

The Cupcake Shoppe (2417 Yonge St, 416.322.6648)

Peek-a-boo cupcakes from The Cupcake Shoppe!

Offering a total of 17 nut-free flavours, with nine available in-store each and every day, The Cupcake Shoppe wins the award for having the most creative cupcake names. Some of my favourites include Yonge ‘n’ Eligible (vanilla or chocolate cake with vanilla buttercream), Sleepless in Toronto (vanilla or chocolate cake with coffee buttercream), Curious George (vanilla or chocolate cake with banana buttercream), and Eh? (vanilla cake with maple buttercream). At $2.50 a pop, these little cakes taste as amazing as they sound and more than worth the price.

Lollicakes (859 Mount Pleasant Rd, 416.482.2253)

While Lollicakes doesn’t offer a wide variety of flavours (vanilla or chocolate cake with vanilla or chocolate icing), they sure do make their cakes to be the very best they can! The cake is light, yet rich in flavour, and the icing is very sugary sweet. Best to pair these $3.00 cupcakes with a glass of milk! Like The Cupcake Shoppe, Lollicakes also offers nut-free cupcakes, but additionally they are certified Kosher. I tried a chocolate cupcake with pink vanilla icing on my first trip to this bakery, and they impressed me by freshly piping the icing to order! Sometimes the littlest touches make the biggest difference.

Miss Cora’s Kitchen (69 Kensington Ave, 416.593.2672)

This adorable Kensington Market bakery only sells mini-cupcakes, but they sure are mega-delicious! Available in chocolate, vanilla, lemon, and carrot cake (with amazingly rich cream cheese icing) for $1.50 a piece, they truly are heavenly little creations. And because they’re so small, you can eat more of them without feeling guilty! You’re definitely best to order yourself a whole dozen and try out every flavour!

Truly one of the best ways to perk up your day is to enjoy a perfect individual-sized cake just for you! The map below will help you find my favourite T.O. cupcakeries, but where are yours? Share your top spots in the comments, and happy cupcaking!

1. New York Magazine
The New York Magazine website stands out from the crowd as an exemplary online magazine due to its wide array of web 2.0 features. Visitors to the online version of this print magazine become active participants in the website’s offerings through RSS feeds of articles, blogs on various themes including food and entertainment, bookmarking tools, streaming video, and sidebar widgets for tags and popular posts.

All of these tools enable readers to have an interactive visit to the New York Magazine website, rather than a passive one. Tools such as the RSS feeds and blogs are of great benefit to the publisher and editors of the website as they are efficient ways to deliver content to the reader. The bookmarking tools at the bottom of each article act as an easy way for the reader to share the magazine’s content with others, thus increasing traffic to the website. The New York Magazine website also features sidebar widgets for popular tags and posts. This function can be very helpful from a marketing and advertising point of view because it is an easy way to determine what readers are most interested in.

2. Fast Company
A website for a business/technology magazine should, by definition, lead the pack in advanced features, and fortunately Fast Company’s site does not disappoint. The online version of Fast Company features many web 2.0 features including RSS feeds of articles, bookmarking tools, sidebar widgets, and streaming video.

As with the New York Magazine, these web 2.0 features make the site more easily accessible and interactive for the reader and more successful and informational to the publisher, editors, marketers, and advertisers. Most interesting, however, is the magazine’s use of streaming video, not only within their main website, but also through an off-shoot site called Fast Company TV which is a business video network designed exclusively for the web. This site is also a fantastic web 2.0 site with features such as sharing tools, RSS feeds, embed tools, and widgets. Also of note are the diverse sidebar widgets on each page of the site, including photo galleries, videos, the most popular Fast Company stories on Digg, and the most recently active groups within the forum section of the magazine’s site. These unique features help build a larger community aspect to the online version of Fast Company, thus likely helping to build a bigger subscription base for the print magazine as well.

3. Slate
Slate, the sole online-only magazine in this analysis, uses several web 2.0 features to assist the reader in becoming more engaged in the online reading experience. The primary tools used by Slate include RSS feeds of articles, bookmarking tools, sidebar widgets for the most read and most e-mailed articles, blogs, podcasts, and streaming video.

Like the Fast Company website, Slate Magazine also has an off-shoot video site: Slate V. Again, the Slate video website is just as web 2.0-friendly as the original Slate site, if not even more so. Features for this site include RSS feeds, sharing tools, embed tools, and widgets. The video website acts as a major support system to the original magazine site, providing more content for more users. Through this additional venue, the magazine is using web 2.0 to build its brand directly through itself, rather than with an external platform such as Facebook or Twitter.