Bookworm, no. 77
Ray Reid reviews “Best Canadian Stories 2025.” Leighton Schreyer on Jonathan N. Stea’s “Mind the Science.” Poetry by Natalie Rice. Inside the January/February issue.
Storytime
Best Canadian Stories 2025
Selected by Steven W. Beattie
Biblioasis
264 pages, softcover and ebook
In a “distracted, attention-deficit age,” who has time for prose? In Best Canadian Stories 2025, the editor Steven W. Beattie argues that short stories represent the ideal form of contemporary storytelling, because they “cannot be consumed passively.” By capturing complicated experiences, these narratives serve as the visceral, algorithm-free antidote to an aloof world.
In the opening tale, Mark Anthony Jarman’s “That Petrol Emotion,” a driver hits a boy, then dissociates from reality because of unprocessed guilt. The ensuing mix of sombre, bizarre, and hilarious entries demonstrates how uncomfortable yet necessary it is to communicate our anxieties. In Liz Stewart’s “Funny Story,” a sex toy mishap forces the emotionally distant narrator to be vulnerable with her date en route to the emergency room. In Kawai Shen’s “The Hanged Man,” the stagnant Queenie considers leaving her overachieving partner for an underachieving tarot card enthusiast to satiate her erotic desires. Unfolding as a stream of consciousness, Glenna Turnbull’s “Because We Buy Oat Milk” captures the agony of a mother planning an abortion alone while her husband fails to distinguish her needs as separate from their family’s.
The collection best depicts human flaws and the lessons they impart. The middle-aged dad in Chelsea Peters’s “Mudlark” realizes too late that his passivity has pushed away his family. The mother in Kate Cayley’s “A Day” defects to the West, knowing that she has left her sister to care for their ill parents in poverty. Embracing the uncomfortable, we learn, might help us resist our worst tendencies.
—Ray Reid
The Wellness Trap
Mind the Science: Saving Your Mental Health from the Wellness Industry
Jonathan N. Stea
Penguin Random House Canada
264 pages, hardcover, ebook, and audiobook
Anticipated to be worth almost $200 billion by 2025, the wellness industry has no shortage of ideas about how to cure your mental ailments—quantum neurological reset therapy, energy medicine, and past-life regression therapy, to name a few. But many of the heralded treatments, according to the clinical psychologist Jonathan N. Stea, are products of pseudo-science, meant to attract users through profound yet illegitimate claims.
More than a dramatic plea to eschew “do-it-yourself coffee enema” devices, Mind the Science offers a pragmatic guide that teaches readers how to avoid falling for such “pure quackery.” He outlines nine red flags, including the “overuse of ad hoc hypotheses” (an ambiguous contingency that keeps a theory somewhat true), the “absence of self-correction” (maintaining the same message despite obvious gaps), and the “evasion of peer review” (self-explanatory). “I’ve often pictured pseudoscience as a child that dresses as science for Halloween,” Stea writes. “It can thrive on magical thinking; it wants to trick you or take your resources; and if you squint, it sort of looks like science.”
Stea understands the intoxicating desperation that buoys the industry. After conventional treatments failed to relieve his mother’s complex regional pain syndrome, she turned to alternative medicine—detox foot baths, cleansing bells, reflexology, reiki. None worked, of course. But the lack of solutions from mainstream health care caused resentment in the family: “Science can send us to the moon, but my mother was forced into a decades-long trek through a fog of health uncertainty.” Finding a provider who practises sound, evidence-based therapy proves a challenge—even more so if the seeker suffers from a complicated illness. Although “the burden shouldn’t fall on patients to shop for practitioners as if they were purchasing an appliance,” it often does.
—Leighton Schreyer
Poet’s Corner
Larkspur
There might as well been larkspur
at the foot of the bed, for the night grew
into the shape of a woman
growing into the shape of mist over
the perfect cove. In the garden,
white petals fell on the dark soil, even though
she didn’t believe in wings.
She remembered spruce, which were plentiful
and planed into hulls. She grew up by the water,
she heard the soft sails rise. Back then, the forest
was silent except for each animal in its private cave.
On some nights, when the field
rested its eye, she would return to watch over us.
A wood thrush on the foot of the bed.
—Natalie Rice is the author of Scorch and a new collection due out this year. Find more of her work in a physical copy of the latest Literary Review of Canada, on newsstands now.
Inside the January/February Issue
Explore the Big Smoke with Pamela Divinsky’s review of The Beaches: Creation of a Toronto Neighbourhood, by Richard White; Stroll: Psychogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto, by Shawn Micallef; and Wheeling through Toronto: A History of the Bicycle and Its Riders, by Albert Koehl.
“And it was at this dangerous moment (broadside imminent) that I made the mistake of shifting my attention from my opponent’s looming size (disconcerting) to his eyes (worse). A well-stoked flame burned there. Uh‑oh, I thought. I recognized the uncomplicated glare of righteousness. Had I been a betting man, my money wouldn’t have been on me.” Come sail away with David Macfarlane.
Sam White reviews Jean Marc Ah-Sen’s party novel, Kilworthy Tanner: A Pseudobiography.
And much more!