Why reading Sjon's From the Mouth of the Whale is a regular tradition for Carleigh Baker
This interview originally aired on Dec. 24, 2018.
Carleigh Baker is a Métis/Icelandic author whose debut short story collection Bad Endings was on the shortlist for the 2017 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and won the 2017 Vancouver Book Award.
Baker tells The Next Chapter why she keeps returning to From the Mouth of the Whale by Sjón.
"A book that I go back to every year, normally around the Christmas season, is From the Mouth of the Whale by Sjón, who is an Icelandic writer. The book is this phantasmagoric, semi-nightmarish, beautiful and poetic story. The book is informed by mythology, Icelandic history, paganism and the effects of Christianity on Iceland. It could not be more different from the writing that I do. Maybe that's why I go back to it every year. It's a short, dense, poetic book. I read it every year around Christmas."
Carleigh Baker's comments have been edited for length and clarity.