thebacklistborrower's Reviews (570)

probably just a "not-right-now", but it was very dark and I just couldn't handle it.

At my book club, the book was described as “buoyantly desperate”, and we all agreed that that was a very apt description.

City of Thieves takes place during the Siege of Leningrad during WW2, and is about the Quixotic journey of Lev Benioff, a teenaged jewish russian boy, and the bombastic soldier Kolya. After each being picked up separately by the police and threatened with death, they are instead asked to find a dozen eggs for the Colonel’s daughter’s wedding cake. This starts them on an odyssey through the streets of the war-torn Leningrad and beyond, crossing paths with ordinary criminals, Germans, cannibals, and spies.

We all really liked this book. We had read The Orphanage not too long ago, and certainly found similarities, but the tones of each were very different. While Lev had a tendency to despair (perfectly reasonable), Kolya kept not only Lev looking on the brightside, but the readers too. He had this personality that him just farther than reasonable, but never really got him into trouble (somehow). We also enjoyed the deeply boyish perspective of the books, and thought it well done. Both characters are under 20, and their talk ranged from war to food, and of course, to girls and sex, but nobody in the book club thought it toxic or unpleasant to read. All the girls and women in the book are treated with respect, which I think is how it balanced well.

Beyond books, David Benioff has written for Marvel and Game of Thrones, and this screenwriting background explained why the book is very theatrical. I often felt like I could see the scenes as they happened, for better or worse. This was an enjoyable read for all, but if you know people who might find reading “boring” this book would be a good recommendation for them with the theatrical language and the pacing, action, excitement, and adventure.

“No one pays women like us any attention. We’re harmless, inconsequential.”

It's the 1980s in Montreal and Muna Heddad has emigrated from Lebanon with her son. Leaving behind a career as a teacher, she is promised a good job in education by immigration officials, but after months looking for work, she sees an ad for Nutri-fort, a mail-order weight loss company, and after a brief orientation, quickly finds she is very good at it.

I half-wondered if this book would take a fantastical turn like the movie “Sorry to Bother You”. Both are about minorities taking on call centre jobs to make ends meet, but the similarities end there (but the movie is certainly worth watching). Throughout Hotline, Muna struggles to be seen as she sees herself. Because of her immigration status, she’s not seen as qualified for western work. Due to her race, she’s not seen to be a french teacher. As a single mother, she’s not seen to be desirable, or available. She takes on the alter ego “Mona” for her work. Summed up by her supervisor, congratulating her for her success: “I think they like your accent. It’s as if talking to you doesn’t count”. 

I really loved Hotline. I found myself gently carried along by her train of thoughts and worries, connecting me deeply to Muna and her struggles. It did not take long to find myself rooting for her, success in her life, and recognition of her true existence. The path Muna takes with her identity through to the ending of the book was unexpected, and gave me pause. Whether or not its a happy ending is up to interpretation, I think.  

This book could easily lead readers to shift perspectives. We see intimately the mind of a woman trying to make due through the tumult of a new life, racism, and the identity crisis that came with her immigration. I’m excited to see how this one is debated!

 

What if a family tree isn’t a tree at all? What if it’s more like a forest?

When it came out, I thought Greenwood was a mystery/thriller novel (and therefore something I wasn’t interested in reading). I said as much on somebody’s post… a comment later liked by Michael.

Instead, Greenwood is a multi-generational novel about the Greenwood family, starting with Jacinda (Jake), a biologist who is working as an underpaid tour guide at an exclusive forest retreat in 2038 where no forests exist. And following her family tree back as far as 1908, when her great-grandfather and his brother began their careers in logging. Through it all are trees and the way we have used and abused their resources -- for beauty, art, and evil. 

After my initial, wild misunderstanding of the plot was corrected, I was excited to see Greenwood on the Canada Reads shortlist, and so were a lot of other readers. It did not disappoint. The opening page shows a cross-section of a tree, rings labeled 2038, 2008, 1974, 1934, and 1908, with an arrow cut through them to represent a map that show the reader the shape of the story. It's not that the plot jumps around, but takes us into the past, and then back out towards the future. In this way, the characters and motivations are established as the reader goes backwards, and then as we go back forwards, we see how the influence of the past shaped the next generations’ future. It was completely engrossing and very well done.

Regardless of how this book places in Canada Reads, you should read it. It is one of the best multi-generational family sagas I’ve read, and the level of detail in the story is impressive. However, I am curious to see the direction the debater Keegan Connor Tracy goes to argue how this book shifts perspectives. Of the three I’ve read so far, Greenwood is one of the best books but, to me, not the most obvious at showing a new perspective. But we will see how the debates go! 

Perhaps rightly so, a book about people trying to figure out their identity completely defies categorization. A little bit of drama, a little bit of romance, a little bit of sci-fi and fiction, its all those things together but none of those things on their own. And in this way, I see why it seems pretty universally liked!

The book mostly follows the story of Katrina, a trans girl who runs away from her abusive childhood home, and Shizuka, the world’s best violin teacher, who struck a deal with a demon to deliver seven souls in 49 years. Coming in on the last year, Shizuka has her pick of young students desperate to be coached by her, but instead she discovers Katrina in a park, and while she clearly never had formal training, her spark inspires Shizuka to take her on. But as Shizuka grows to care for Katrina, she wonders whether she can go through with the deliverance of the final soul. We also meet a woman who is struggling to maintain her family business in violin repair, and a family of aliens escaping a war and deadly plague on the sleepy Earth by presenting as donut makers. 

Over and over again, this book is about people trying to become who they know they are, and others trying to be people they are not. This is shown in Katrina’s struggle to be accepted as a girl, to an AI trying to be accepted as an autonomous individual, and the violin maker thinking she can’t be so, for she is not a man like all those before her in the family business. 

It was sweet, and at times very dark (CW: transphobia, abuse, sexual assault), but it is balanced beautifully throughout, and the complexity only made it a more enjoyable read. I loved the discussion of music and feeling in the book. It was a very entertaining and fast read, so if you like a book that will give you a bit of everything (including all the emotions), Light from Uncommon Stars is for you!

“Thank goodness, no!” was my exclamation to my mum, who suggested I must have had similar experiences in my career in engineering as Kate had in Ducks. At that time, I was approximately half way through, and after a duology of harrowing scenes, I’d paused my read. But by the end of the book, I had seen more of my experience than I expected. Weeks later, and I’m reflecting on the very last panels still.

Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands is a graphic memoir written and illustrated by Kate Beaton, who, like many other Antlantic Canadians, went to work in the oil sands after getting her arts degree. Spending a total of two years there between 2007 and 2009, with a year in Victoria in the middle, she wrestles with the emotional, physical, and environmental toxicity of the work. The title is a reference to a mass poisoning of migrating ducks at the Syncrude plant, but its not hard to draw the line between the ducks and the workers who both suffer-- and die-- from the greed of corporations trying to wring every dollar of profit out of their operations. 

At first, Kate is deep in the fields, one of only a few woman working amongst hundreds of men. She’s on full display, and the men don’t use innuendo when talking about her. Its this level of misogyny I’m grateful to not have experienced. In the second half, however, she’s working an office job, and it's there I see my experience: not the obvious misogyny of creeps, but the insidious, casual chatter that has women question whether they are being uptight, or overreacting, or trying to determine what is worth stepping out of line to challenge. She learned, as I have, that in some situations, you just keep quiet and move on. Not only can you not fight every battle, but to try would be social suicide, and in her case, even dangerous.  

Kate shows that good people can be bad people when put in bad places. Friendly folk can be misogynists, and many people don’t see it that way. This book can, and will, shift those perspectives. 

In Canada, Medical Assistance in Dying (MAiD) was legalized after the Supreme Court found that forbidding people from seeking such assistance infringed on Canadian’s right to liberty and security of the person. The government was given a year to develop legislation, and in early June 2017, Stefanie Green, previously a maternity doctor, made her first consultation for MAiD, absent any resources, guiding documents, or federal legislation, and with only limited training abroad to inform this new branch of medical services. 

This is where the book starts, and from there, we come with Dr. Green on multiple visits as she breaks the trail for doctors providing medical assistance in dying across the country. It isn’t exclusively a memoir, but also an informative glance at the many issues and challenges that were faced by doctors providing MAiD in the early days, and even today. We see her meet with patients who did not meet the requirements for assisted dying, and, even more heartbreaking, patients where it was unclear if they did. We see patients who had every detail of their death planned, and others who were unable to proceed as hoped. Through them all, Stefanie learns and reflects on what makes a good life and a good death, and what is most important to her.

In addition to the anecdotes of her first year and a bit of providing MAiD, she also provides details about the history in Canada, the United States, and abroad, the social responses, and how the service intersects with hospice care. I was fascinated to learn that as Canada legalized maid through a rights-based challenge, it has a much different foundation than other countries, where the service was legalized by advocacy from doctors, or public petitions. 

I really loved this novel. It was educational, interesting, but also very emotional. Obviously its a niche topic, but if the subject matter appeals, I’d definitely recommend it. I listened to the audiobook, narrated by the author, and it is very well done. 

In the depths of the lockdown in 2020, I was burnt out and looking at graduate studies. I was particularly interested in feminist studies, and somehow my partner failed to mention, until that moment, “hey, my cousin does that I think”. 

This is an academic text, and without any relevant post-secondary education, it took me a while to get the jargon. But once I’d orientated myself, the book validated and educated me. Like most philosophy, moral responsibility and the question of what is a good or bad action has been determined by a lot of white men. And frequently, those theories make assumptions that everybody is logical, everybody has equal power, and everybody is equally believed when making an accusation.

What I found validating is I have struggled to buy into conventional moral responsibility. Intellectually, Kant, and Utilitarianism felt like shirts that didn’t fit right-- I was always trying to tuft them to get them to fit. I noticed this particularly strongly when I was taking an ethics class for my engineering licenses. Some of the examples came to moral conclusions that weren’t *wrong* but also not the approach I’d take. When I took my exam, I joked with myself to “Think like an old white man” XD. She points out that conventional approaches are rooted in principles and justice, but in intersectional feminist spaces, justice is very often unlikely and principles are impossible when one must account for the infinite spectrum of intersectionality. Instead, it is argued that instead, a theory rooted in care that recognizes the impact of power in relationships will lead to better outcomes. 

The book also validated the actions and norms of feminist spaces. It gave credence to the importance of speaking blame to a sympathetic ear without attempting legal justice, the value of providing care to somebody harmed without requiring a report, of whisper networks and #MeToo statements. This book will inform my activism and my reading for a long time.

 

This was my pick for the #UnreadShelfProject2022 prompt “a book that scares you”. Not because it was spooky, but its format: a narrative poem in five parts, concurrently tracing the lives of the author, his fictional characters on Saint Lucia, the history of colonialism and slavery in the Americas and Carribean, and, very loosely, the Iliad. 

It sounded like a lot and I was worried about it going over my head, but its on the “30 Books to Celebrate 30 Years of Writers and Company”, so I knew I’d have to get to it one day. I got pretty panicked a few chapters in at how confused I was, but eventually found a chapter-by-chapter synopsis on Shmoop, and that helped carry me along when I got lost, and also pick up on things I otherwise probably would have missed.

This is all to say, while this book isn’t for those looking for something light and easy to read, it is ABSOLUTELY worth the effort. It's a grand mental adventure, like climbing a mountain, complete with easy and hard parts, and the beautiful and boring scenes (and only getting lost a little ;) ). I dog-eared the book to pieces, highlighting the lines and stanzas I wanted to go back, review, and record. The lyrical language used to describe Saint Lucia, mirrored against a stanza about slavery, or the impacts of cruises on the island meant I was never truly comfortable, and always paying attention.

Derek Walcott was a Nobel Prize winner, and they say this is his masterpiece. I can see why: love, heartbreak, rage, intergenerational pain and trauma, climate change, slavery, broken treaties, and the beauty and death of a simple island life at the hands of American tourists are all revealed, and none seem out of place, or forced. 

I won’t say everybody should read this, because most probably won’t. But if you like books that challenge you and make you work, put this on your TBR. Give it your time, effort, and attention, and you won’t regret it. I’ve never read anything like it, and I don’t expect to for a long while.

I picked this up after an appointment with my counsellor when I felt like I needed a little treat for myself (of course ;)).

The book is a response to the famous “Hero of 1000 Faces” by Joseph Campbell. This is the book that laid out the hero’s quest, but which also only gives women three roles in myth: “one, to give men life; two, to be the one who receives [men] in death; and three, to inspire [men's] spiritual, poetic realization.” As historically in life and literature women weren’t allowed to go on quests, Maria Tatar looks at traits and actions of heroines who are heroic from the hearth -- from their own sphere of influence.

She looks at several tropes of female heroism: women who spoke truth to power, often at great personal risk, those who used their gendered talents and skills to combat an enemy, women who used their curiosity and caring to solve a mystery, and those who took on the form of trickster to achieve their aims. She looks at stories as old as the Tale of Gilgamesh, Scheherazade’s tales, many mythologies, and modern stories including Miss Marple and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, each time making the case that women in literature throughout time were heroic, even if it wasn’t framed that way when they were written.

Except for where Tatar derides The Hero with 1000 Faces for its obvious sexism (as quoted above), she does not take a red pen to the book to cut it down. Rather, her book is a counterpoint and foil, supplementing, challenging, and countering the hero trope so laid out in Campbell’s book, and opening the window through which to see our heroines.

On the topic of gender, the book is essentialist, with no reference to trans or queer Elliot Page is also deadnamed in the chapter which discusses his role in Juno (and the book was published after he came out, so it isn’t a timing thing).

But overall, I loved what I learned in this book and found it absolutely fascinating! I can’t wait to apply what Tatar has framed in books I read going forwards.