Pearl Pirie’s lists, reviews, interviews, etc. since 2005

Year End Audit

I suppose I could do this Jan 1st and to a degree will.

I had a few guiding goals going into the year: Abandon books instead of slog, read more BIPOC, more queer, more in translation
more by disabled, more in French.

About 10% BIPOC. On French, I finished none. What/who counts as disabled? Bit hard to quantify. 8% self-declared queer. I quit more books, so this year no books 1 star of 5 completed.

Because our world is interconnected, I am not attempting to read Canada, but observe where. 4/5 Canadian, a quarter American, almost a tenth British.

28 books were re-reads, which is the highest year for me. A push to revisit.

Reading books that are not current took a hit by not making that a focus. Half were published within a year, almost 80% within 12 years. Deep history, not so much. Only 10 titles are from over a century ago.

But 7 sci-fi fantasy, a growing section. I read half the amount of fan fiction compared to last year.

60% poetry last year. 52% this year. Same number of chapbooks as last year, 70-some. A tange of 8 pages to 1200 pages. So far the average is about 145 pages of a title. About half for free by library, Little Free Library, gift or review copies.

Where do these things come from? House gnomes?

Online, book fairs, directly from the author or publisher mostly, nearly 60% that way. Next 13% from a library or Amazon. Only 13 titles new from a bookstore. That strikes me as few but twice as much as last year. Used book stores are close to the same.

Next I suppose, the fav list of most recommend…

Elsewhere

A funny thing for you to come here for me to send you away again, but some tome ago blogger stopped working for me so I migrated those sites to my own dang server. And my old cat blog got deleted by WordPress as dormant on their server. I got the files restored.

The only files you control can’t be hosted by someone you can’t control. See Meta(stasize) empire of Instagram, Facebook. The twitter, the blue sky, the what have you.

Long story not too short, Looking on the Bri Side , Pearl Essence and Catnips & Catnaps are now housed here. The dog he just scatters though all my social media. Should I build him a blog retroactively? He’s pretty old. He might live a year or six…

And a reminder to those reading in close to real time, there’s that event at 1 Canal St. Ottawa of the Refused.

P.F. Yacht Club

The annual regatta reading is coming Dec 27th, an office party for Ottawa poets.

A new venue, a coffee shop/art gallery showroom in the midst of residential neighbourhood.

As usual lovingly hosted by our own rob mclennan,
This time The Peter F. Yacht Club annual regatta/christmas party/reading will be at Anina’s Café, 280 Joffre-Bélanger Way, Ottawa
Saturday, December 27, 2025, doors 7pm; reading 7:30pm

Readings from yacht club regulars and irregulars alike, including: Jennifer Baker, Frances Boyle, Conyer Clayton, David Currie, Michelle Desbarats, AJ Dolman, Amanda Earl, Claire Farley, Cara Goodwin, Chris Johnson, Margo LaPierre, rob mclennan, Christine McNair, James Moran, Lee Parpart, Colin Quin, Mahaila Smith, Grant Wilkins and Chuqiao Yang (and possibly others, like Pearl Pirie)

See rob’s report on the event two years ago here