thebacklistborrower's Reviews (570)

Have I mentioned I LOVE Artificial Intelligence stories? Definitely my favourite sci-fi trope. Its something about exploring identity, humanity, society, and connection through something that is usually assumed to be…well… robotic, absent of emotion or humanity (to the extent that we understand the term). However, Klara and the Sun was nothing like any other AI story I’d read in that it was first person, from the perspective of Klara, and the AIs of this universe were just so unlike the others I’ve read.

In this world, Klara is an “AF”, an “artificial friend”, and essentially a consumer product in a world where so much of interaction is virtual that affluent families buy their kids AFs to have around. Or at least that was my impression. Since the book is from an AFs perspective, a lot of the details of society are up for interpretation. Klara has a very limited understanding of the world and therefore the reader has to fill in the blanks. It made for a VERY good book club book as many of us came out of the book with different interpretations of the society and the events of the book, based on how we filled in those blanks. 

Klara is assigned to be an AF to a young girl who appears to be chronically ill, but its not fully explained why (again, up to interpretation). She sets out help the girl get better by pleading to her own deity figure, as a robot that gets her energy from solar energy -- the sun. Klara is so motivated to help her human get better, going on explorations beyond any other AF we hear about, getting help from the girl’s father, friend, and making personal sacrifices along the way.

I definitely got Black Mirror vibes from some parts of this book (at least with my interpretations of things), and I think the same story from any other perspective would have been exceptionally dark. However, to experience it through the perspective of Klara and her child-like understanding of things helped keep the very dark realities of the world at bay, resulting in a beautiful, tender story of love.

 

 

In 1971, the editor at House of Anansi press received a stack of fancy bond paper in a jewelry box tied with a ribbon, with instructions to “throw the pages into the air and arrange them as they fell”. While this book did arrive at my doorstep bound as most books, this introduction to the book (by said editor) entranced me to this novella. 

Passing Ceremony is gothic at its best -- a series of vignettes of the attendees at a wedding, where the bride has a reputation and the groom is gay, and none of the attendees really want to be there in the first place. The bride’s father is there from Mexico his a new wife younger than the bride and a new baby. An elderly grandparent feels like people are trying to kill her. A man is trying to find some new woman to pick up, while another woman thinks about her lover. One man is looking forward to seeing if his dom could meet up later (if she’s not busy). All around the scenery of a wedding and reception that is literally only being done for the image of it.

I loved this book and the concept. While I’m sure slicing it out of its binding and tossing it around would create an excellent story, the organization of each vignette is creeping towards the end of what most people think is a joyous day. Instead, we see mockery, pain, misanthropy, unrequited love. Although, it does seem like the bride and groom do truly care for each other as friends, and this was a tiny life raft in a book of social turbulence. 

Its a quick read, and certainly one that can be picked up and put down at a whim. Helen Weinzweig has such a gift for capturing the desperate malaise of women trapped by society in the 70s. Basic Black With Pearls captures it rather differently, but both are excellent works of Canadian feminist fiction that should be on any Canadian’s - or feminist’s - reading list.

 

 This was my first buddy read/listen with my partner on a long road trip. I am not usually a non-fiction person, and certainly not a self-help/productivity reader, but it seemed good.

In Atomic Habits, James Clear lays out the four rules of building(or breaking) habits, and then expands at the end with more applications on the rules. As far as audiobooks go, this was a slim 5.5hours, so when combined with the clear, concise summaries to each chapter, it almost felt more like a podcast than an audiobook.

Overall I liked the book. Like most people, there are habits I’d like to build and break, and I thought the four rules and the many examples he gives on applying them were helpful. Towards the end there was a section on genes and our own personal nature (organized vs disorganized, goal-motivated, etc) that I thought got a *little* bit tangential but was still helpful, at least once the point was made. 

And most importantly the book was helpful in getting me to build a routine for a new habit. I have been struggling to maintain a piano habit for a year now. I have a keyboard, but can’t get myself to play. So, using the guidance of the book, I’m going to commit to a new habit to play, following the four rules. 

I’ll check back in to see how this goes for me. If you’re looking to get some habits going, I’d definitely check out this book. Its so short and well-summarized that its easy to learn from and apply to your own life. 

 

I was sent this book from @anansibookshop as the first book I got from my annual subscription. It's a play! And it is the wildest one I’ve ever heard of. Take a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, and cross it with a social drama. In real life, the play is held in a manor, and you can leave the scenes as characters do, and follow them into different scenes in other rooms. That chauffeur seems a little suspicious? Follow him as he leaves the scene to the servants stairway where he confides with a maid what he’s really up to. Want to know what the maid does with that information? Follow her to the oratory where she confides in the lady of the house. Then take that concept and overlay it with the setting of the manor of a political prisoner of Mussolini and a famous polish art deco artist he’s trying to sleep with/get painted by. Up to 9 scenes can be happening concurrently! I’m TOTALLY in LOVE with this book (thank you Basil from Anansi, I am forever in your favour for sending this to me).

There are, therefore, a few different ways to read the book. You can play god and read all the concurrent scenes so you can see everything that happens in the whole manor to everybody. How I read it is how it is intended to be seen: I followed the characters that seemed most interesting to me, alternating between an Italian composer and a former concert pianist as they seemed like they’d be dramatic (I wasn’t wrong). But the aforementioned chauffeur is noted as “suspicious” right in the play notes, and I didn’t even get to following Gabriele D'Annunzio, “Italy's narcissistic cultural hero”, or Tamara de lempika herself. Those will have to come in another reading.

I probably read fewer than half the scenes the first time through, but I kept notes, so the next time I read through I can find different scenes, and learn hopefully more about the very dramatic ending, which I read knowing I missed something very important while I was off somewhere else in the manor. If you love theatre, and want something incredibly unique, read this book!

 Cw: suicide, depression, death

This author/translator duo is a must-buy for me, but it still took me a while to get to this book! I was not disappointed, however. Saucier’s books just always dig so deep into the spirit and the heart with a cast of characters and a style that totally absorbs me.

And Miles to Go Before I Sleep is a written recollection of a train buff and English teacher who follows the mysterious journey of an old woman, Gladys, who leaves her chronically suicidal daughter at home in the sleepy town of Swastika and begins a journey, ending in her death, that leaves everybody in her wake baffled and confused. We meet tourists, old friends, conductors, and complete strangers who crossed paths with her and, in a few cases, get swept up in her wake. Interspersed amongst these recollections were memories of Gladys’ time in school trains in northern Ontario, train history, and the author’s own thoughts on the whole thing.

The book covers so many topics: As we jumped from one train to the next, the clickety-clack of the tracks following the narrator as far away as France, we explore so many topics: aging and death, self-determination, freedom, community, neighbourhood, mental health, and family. All bundled into one story that isn’t quite a mystery, but not quite a drama either. As a written recollection, it is framed as something not finished -- there are asides by the writer, breaks through the fourth wall to fictitious readers, and a half-parsed structure, as if we picked up part way through the narrator’s editing style. But as Saucier’s book, it is wonderful and reads so well. The incomplete nature of the style, and the rather unfinished ending, made as a reader that I was in the story too, and all I could do was jump on the train and go for a ride.

 

Its poetry month! Which means I’m finally getting around to reviewing this book I read a few months ago. Being a total House of Anansi fangirl, I couldn’t help but pick up a book said to be “the most important contemporary books of poetry in our country” by somebody who also wrote the ever-popular Alligator Pie.

First written in 1968, the book takes a pointed look at what it means to be human, but also what it means to be Canadian. Written in the midst of the Vietnam war, the book not-so-subtly points out the failures of Canadian politicians in doing anything meaningful about the conflict. And local politics are covered to: the rapid urbanization of the population, development of cities outpacing the natural world and human connections to it and to each other(of course, also written during the rise of the freeway, often built down the middle of major urban centres).

This book of poems absorbed me. I reread pages over and over, I dogeared, undersigned, and flagged lines I want to come back to over and over. From the perspective both of excellent poetry and Canadian history and politics, this book is one to recommend.

The final Canada Reads 2022 book! I only got it 3 days before the debates, so . I didn’t finish it before it was voted off on Day 1, but actually almost DNF’d it. The start was challenging, with mentions of physical and sexual abuse of Clayon as a child, violence against his mother by her boyfriends, discussion about drugs and trauma. But the style was also difficult, written stream-of-consciousness with very low levels of organization or structure. Between the style and the content I found it hard to get engaged in the book. However, I found the last parts much better (although one friend thinks the opposite). 

The book is separated into four or five parts, starting with Clayton’s childhood and young adulthood, followed by stages of his growth as an environmental activist. Overall, the book has the repetition and circular style foundational to Indigenous storytelling, but this was not obvious in the first part. However, the stories and incidents brought up as incongruous anecdotes at the start come back over and over again through the successive parts of the book, showing us how they influenced Clayton throughout his life. At one point he says “I have spoken as an Indigenous man, as an activist, as someone seeking the correct spiritual path through a landscape pocked and pitted by traps [...] some of my own creation.” And in that line, I saw the book: over and over, he revisits his story from different points in his life, when he was following different paths: as the young Indigenous man not expected to be anything, as the activist fuelled by anger, as the man who reconnected with his spirituality and allowed it to change him. These paths weave in and out of each other, and he strays from them, but they are all connected.

I’m glad I persevered through the first part to see the big picture of the story. Be prepared to give yourself the time and space to read this book, but overall it's definitely worth getting through.

 

Fourth Canada Reads book this year! Unless there is a miracle, I don’t see myself getting Life in the City of Dirty Water before next week. What Strange Paradise had been on my list since its publish date last year, but I don’t think I knew what I was expecting. The book follows a very young boy, Amir, on a journey across the Mediterranean sea and his escape from immigration detention on reaching a Greek island, aided by a teenaged girl named Vanna. It jumps back and forth: one chapter on the boat, one chapter of escape, which makes the book a very fast read. I liked it, and enjoyed the format as it kept the story very fast-paced. Throughout his journey, we see him experiencing kindness from strangers on the boat and on land, which meant the story wasn’t as dark as I expected. Compared to Scarborough, I didn’t find I felt nearly as strongly about the characters or their situation. Then I got to the end. A friend had warned me that it would change things, and it did. But I also don’t want to give too much away. The end forced me to re-evaluate the entire rest of the book, and see it in a completely new way. As a book on its own, I really enjoyed reading it and the end completely threw me for a loop (which I love out of an ending).  

But the real question is: how is this one book to connect us? I think this is a strong book, and I think it will win Canada Reads, but I don’t think it is the best book to connect us. I feel like in order to build connection with other readers, I need to feel passion and connection to the book, its stories, and its characters, and I just didn’t get that out of What Strange Paradise. If we both can find common ground in a passion for this book and what it made us feel, it is a foundation to build a connection over. It was a great book, but Scarborough remains my top pick to win Canada Reads this year.

 

 The third back-to-back-to-back Canada Reads shortlist of the year. I started out really liking the book. It wasn’t quite as depressing as Scarborough or Five Little Indians, and had a good sense of adventure! The book follows Washington Black (Wash), a slave on a plantation in Barbados who is taken under wing by an eccentric inventor who goes by Titch. After an event that has Wash and Titch fearing for his life, they escape the island in a homemade flying device. This starts an epic journey all over the colonized world for Wash, who discovers his place in a world as a freed slave. 

This is the first book by Esi that I have read, but I loved her Massey Lectures in 2022. She is an excellent storyteller, and the imagery and pace of this book make a strong showing for that. Whether in the Arctic, Africville, England or Morocco, looking at the frozen arctic or the bright, lively wildlife of tidal pools, the reader is absolutely transported. The assorted characters that come and go from Wash’s life feel full and real. 

But that being said, I found the ending unsatisfying. It just ends, leaving the reader lost. Some people like it, some people do not. But I think even disliking it, I’d recommend the book to somebody to read.

From the perspective of being about “a book to connect us”, I think it is weaker than the other two I’ve read. The book has themes of connection, but in terms of connecting readers, I don’t think it does as strongly (except connecting readers on their opinion of the ending ;) ). Where the others I’ve read, I think there is a much stronger foundation for connection. The books are more current, and each is firmly placed in our current reality. I’m curious to see how these debates go and what the debater argues. It's a great book for those who like history and adventure, but it's not my top pick for Canada Reads.

 

Scarborough was the second Canada Reads 2022 book that I read, immediately after reading Five Little Indians, and is also a book ultimately about the connections we have and communities we make.

Scarborough follows the story of a cast of characters living in Scarborough, loosely connected through a literacy program offered through a local library, headed by a muslium woman named Ms Hina. While the program is intended to be only a literacy program, Ms Hina turns it into a social program, with meals for the many families who show up in need of breakfast or snack.

This book was slim but packs a punch. Like Five Little Indians (I’m going to stop saying this now), it was a hard read. The experiences in this book are real. They are happening right now, in Scarborough, and in my neighbourhood. The poverty, racism, sexism, and abuse are so real in this book. What saved me when reading this book was Ms Hina and a shelter supervisor who brought care to these folk who had so few people caring for them.

The connections in this book are in multitude: between Ms Hina and the kids in her program, and their parents; the connections between the kids themselves; kids and the street folk that live outside their homes, and the neighbours that look after them. Some of them are fleeting connections, like the man who heads to a gay hookup, and some are deep, if not lasting.

Any reader of this book will connect over the intensity of this book, and the stories it tells. Whether or not a reader has the lived experience of those in poverty, perhaps they have been the privileged kid looking down on those with less because that is what their parents--and society-- have taught them. Or they have been those like Ms Hina and the shelter worker, creating safe spaces and caring for all, despite everything. 

This was a beautiful book and will be one of my top picks this year.