I have almost another 250 waiting to be written, but I have been wanting to get going on them again for some time. I keep shifting my approach to sharing online, but at least this last time, I stripped it way down. I don’t quite have the process nailed, but at least I’m going again.

One thing that was a bit funny tonight was that I went to write the book review, and I started thinking about “which book” was worthy of being #200? I don’t really have a good handle on the order in which I’ve read them, so that isn’t the deciding factor. When I did #100, I chose Trace by the late Warren Murphy. Murphy has always been my favourite author, and reading Trace taught me that not all detectives were like Sherlock Holmes or Agatha Christie or even the Three Investigators. It inspired me to consider that maybe someday, I too could write a novel of this type.

For #200, I was tempted to go with another late author, Alison Gordon, of Toronto sports journalism fame. I wonder what she’d write today after seeing the Jays blow a six run lead and exit the wild card game with a loss. Janet Evanovich, Anne Perry, J.A. Jance, even Meg Cabot (more YA) would all be good candidates of the mystery genre. I considered Elizabeth Moon’s The Speed of Dark which is just brilliant.

There are some weird options too…Paprika by Yasutaka Tsutsui is sort of Japanese dream porn, very different from anything else I’ve ever read.

In the end, I went with a memoir. I wish it was a better one, but North To Paradise by Ousman Umar does have some compelling elements in it. It tells a harrowing journey from Ghana to Europe, starting when he was 12 years old. It reads much like some biographies of migrants coming to Canada or the U.S. in the 1800s or early 1900s — except all of his extreme hardship happens in the 2010s, not the 1910s. It’s hard to view that life against the people he encounters in Europe within days of living that life, people whose lives are very different. Alas, the book has little introspection in it, no ability to step outside himself, and some of the truly uncomfortable parts of his emotional journey are either glossed over or dismissed in favour of talking about acquiring food or shelter.