thebacklistborrower's reviews
538 reviews

Just couldn't get into it. I didn't think I knew or cared about the characters all that much. 

Noopiming -- “in the bush” in Anishinaabemowin -- has many meanings in this book of poetry by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. It can refer to Mashkawaji - living beneath the ice in a remote Ontario lake after a historic tragedy. Or, it can be interpreted ironically to the seven characters connected to Mashkawaji, who spend much of the book in Toronto. Simpson herself says it's a response to the book “Roughing it in the Bush” by [white lady] Susanna Moodie. Each is a different reflection of colonization and its impacts.

In 10 parts, we first meet Mashkawaji, who in turn introduces us to seven human and non-human characters who each fulfill a different role for them: for example, Akiwenzii is their will or the maple tree Ninaatig, their lungs. Reflecting on this book, while I can’t remember each particular character, I know who they are, and what they live in this book is a decolonial life. They sleep on the lake (in an unspoken agreement with parks police), they memorize the cost of tarps at Canadian Tire (tarps can be used for many things, like tipis), and they just leave to go to the bush. Caribou move through the streets, they boat on Lake Ontario. They use  Anishinaabemowin pronouns, and connect with and care for each other. 

This isn’t to say the book is post-colonial, in a far future, or ignores the impacts. It's just beyond it. The book says that it happened (what tragedy befell Mashkawaji?), but Nishnaabeg have their own lives to live now. They are healing themselves, their communities, and their cultures without white people interfering.

Susanna Moodie and her sister, Catharine Parr Traill both encouraged the colonization of Canada through the writing of their memoirs and the helpful “The Female Emigrant's Guide, and Hints on Canadian Housekeeping”, published in 1855. Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies looks past that history, charting a new direction beyond the one started 150 years earlier. 

If I had a nickel for every book I’ve read this year that boomerangs out in time, before returning back to where it started, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but weird it happened twice.

For what is, in my impression, a fairly unique timeline, it has been fun to read twice this year. The first I read was Greenwood by Michael Christie. In Greenwood, we start in the future and step back through four generations of Greenwoods, before returning back to the great-great-granddaughter we start with. What I loved is that Cloud Atlas is that while the timeline is the same, everything else is so different: we start in the past and go to the far distant future, and have to seek the common thread that reveals itself in each story-- the idea that characters in each time are reborn from the ones previous, and we are witnessing the reincarnations of an existence through time. 

I’ve seen this book referred to as confusing, but I didn’t -- maybe it's because I read Greenwood recently, but maybe not. I think like Greenwood, it takes a bit to really get into the book, but once I was in, I was hooked. My favourite parts were the far-distant future sci-fi stories, but each part is interesting in its own way. On pure entertainment value, this is a great book to read. But while the author says the book is about the universality of human nature, I kind of missed it. I can certainly see the parts that can be read that way, but I think for myself, the drastic change in character, scene, and plot maybe obscured it. I was too interested in how the worlds worked to pay that much attention to the characters (but that’s because I’m a sucker for world-building). Greenwood, on the other hand, had much more in common in timeframe to timeframe, so I personally found the messages in that book easier to pick out. 

I’m certainly glad I read it, and I even watched the movie! The Rotten Tomatoes score isn't the best, but not awful, and I personally really liked it. A lot changed, particularly with the futurist Korean scenes, but enjoyable, for just a fun film to watch. 

 Sometime around mid-November and again in mid-March, I do my “gear swap” -- the unenviable task of putting away all of one season’s sports equipment, and unpacking all of the next. Bin after bin is packed with boots, equipment, tools, clothing, protective gear and more. Bikes are hauled into storage (and back out) and skis are waxed or put away. I love sports. In the winter you can find me cross-country skiing (mostly skate, but also classic with friends), snowboarding, backcountry touring, snowshoeing, and occasionally running. I’ve got a set of skates for the once a year I’m invited out for that. Summer sees me trail and road running, gravel biking, mountain biking, and hiking. Plus, of course, intermittent yoga year round, and, mostly recently, I joined a gym. Sports I previously did, but no longer number just as many (including curling, climbing, soccer, flag football, beach volleyball, sprint kayaking, sailing,  and very briefly martial arts).

With this in mind, I LOVED The Secret to Superhuman Strength, but it is so much more than a memoir of Bechdel’s love of sports, and no matter your relationship with fitness, this book is worth reading. Starting at her birth, Alison traces a memoir through the lens of the various fitness trends of society and her own fitness habits. But opens as a fun, comical novel turns much deeper, touching on aging, parental relationships, and Bechdel’s mental health and relationship challenges.

For the fitness fans (no matter how serious) there is a lot of meditation on sports achievement and our own internal guideposts of success. For those who always like to run farther and push harder (no matter the impact), there will likely be some uncomfortable reflections for you. For the rest of us, perhaps cautionary tales and some valuable food for thought. I’d recommend this book to the most ultra of runners to the local forest walker.

My 9th book from the 30 Books to Celebrate 30 Years of Writers and Company, representing 2013 in the list. 

The book opens with a woman assassinating a german man. She dies, and is born. She dies shortly after, and is born yet again, to live. And so we get the glimpse of the life of Ursula Beresford Todd, a woman who is reborn every time she dies. She doesn’t remember her past lives, not really-- but will, in a few lives, see a psychiatrist for her persistent deja vu. Sometimes she lives a long time, and sometimes not. The entertaining and engaging part of this novel felt similar to the fun of the old “choose your own adventure books” -- you never really knew which choice would take you to the “you died” page. Or how many different choices could end at the same page. 

Despite many pages nearly repeating, Kate Atkinson gives us something different every time. I never felt bored, despite reading some scenes a dozen or more times! I kept waiting for the life that would take us to the scene at the start, or whether she’d manage to escape a fate previously fallen to. 

I thought this book was super entertaining. I didn’t think it was all that deep and it certainly wasn’t challenging. Its just a great book to take you along for a really enjoyable ride. Definitely recommended!

Like most in Canada, I grew up lake swimming. In mountainous BC, this resulted in few options: small, high-altitude lakes like Nancy Greene and Champion, large glacier-fed lakes like the Slocan and Kootenay Lakes, and the “warmest tree-lined lake in Canada,” Christina Lake (citation needed, but never, ever found XD). But this has been limited to the warm summer months.

At 28, Lee found herself pursuing a degree in Berlin, and struggling. In Turning, we learn her mixed history with swimming and lakes, but also her determination to swim 52 lakes near Berlin in an effort to help her anxiety, and her heartbreak, and improve her self-confidence. “Turning” is a reference to the lifecycle of a lake through the year -- the warm water at the top in summer, how it sinks and mixes through the fall to freeze in the winter, and then mixes again through the spring. Framed around these four stages and seasons, Jessica’s mental and physical health transforms as well, as she jumps in lake after lake, season by season, traversing blistering summer heat and breaking through ice. 

I love Lee’s writing style. The combination of human and natural history, entwined with her own personal history, makes for a very interesting, yet still relaxing read. Her descriptions of the different water on her body throughout the year were intriguing and inspiring, prompting me to push the limits of my comfort zone, dunking in colder water, later in the year than I previously had. 

There’s a large community of lake dunkers around Nelson (impressive, as Kootenay Lake is thrillingly cold at the best of times), and I already have a queue of people to loan this book to. 

Having caught up on Lee’s books, I now have to eagerly wait for spring 2024 for her next book to be published: Dispersals: On Plants, Borders, and Belonging. Can’t wait!

“Your father came to my country and took my bread, and now I have come to your country to take my bread back”

I’ve put off writing this since May because I didn’t know what to say. The book speaks so well for itself, but it takes the full book to do so-- how do I distill it into a review?

The book largely centres around Jemubhai, a judge living in the Bengal region of India, who learned law and self-loathing at Cambridge in the 1930s. We meet his granddaughter, Sai, raised in English-run boarding schools before being left with Jemubhai. She falls in love with a young Gorkha (an Indian ethic group that is Nepali-speaking) man, forbidden for his race and political beliefs in an independent Gorkha state. We also meet the unnamed “Chef”, whose mind is always on his son Biju in New York, working and living as an undocumented immigrant, but yet who writes back to India with lies about living the American Dream. Through them all we are shown the impacts of racism and colonialism through time, including globalization, economic inequality, multiculturalism, immigration and tourism, intergenerational trauma, and individual, societal, and state violence. 

I felt like I could have highlighted half the book for its quotes, each a blow forging a blade to hold at the heart of colonialism: 
* Profit could only be harvested in the gap between nations. They were damning the third world to be third world.
* While the shopping was converted to dollars, tips to the servants could be calculated in local currency.
* justice was without scope; it might snag the stealer of chickens, but great evasive crimes would have to be dismissed because, if identified and netted, they would bring down the entire structure of so-called civilization.

It sounds dark, but the book has hope, even ending on a positive. It certainly has love. People who liked A Fine Balance -- or who are too intimidated to start it -- should read this book. It will be one of my top books of the year for sure.

Nestled in a remote inlet on Vancouver Island, the Glass Hotel is a premier remote getaway for the rich looking to be close to nature, but not *in* it. It also serves as the hub for the characters of this story, who are all, one way or another, impacted by a massive Ponzi scheme. 

St. John Mandel once again hits it out of the park with this book. I listened to the audio and could hardly stop. It felt more mysterious and suspenseful than Sea of Tranquility, and certainly more rooted in reality, but deeply engaging. I went down a deep dive on Ponzi schemes while reading this book, not actually realizing it was based on a true story (I’d heard of Bernie Madoff but never really the details, similar to my knowledge of Enron I just knew it was some sort of white collar crime). What a trip though! I loved the details of the court case, and particularly how St. John Mandel wrote the thoughts, feelings, and actions of the co-conspirators and victims. The multiple viewpoints made it easy to stay engaged and interested in what came next.

Where this book is most similar to Sea of Tranquility is how effectively distances of time and space are woven together. We could spend a chapter with the mastermind on the west coast of Vancouver Island, one two years earlier with his young trophy wife in their palazzo in New York, and the next 10 years later with a victim of the scheme living in a camper in Texas, and clearly see the threads that bind them all. 

This made for my third St. John Mandel this year, and while I liked Station Eleven well enough, Sea of Tranquility and The Glass Hotel just made me want more! 

Is fiction real, to the people in the story? Or are the people fabricated, and therefore their reality fiction? If they don’t realize they are fabricated, does it matter? What if you read a fiction, but then learn it may be a book written in a different book? 

I’ve seen reviews calling attention to the use of time in Sea of Tranquility, but I couldn’t get past the existential questions of what was even real. Like in Station Eleven, we follow a few characters, but these ones do cross paths and are subtly (and not-so-subtly) influenced by each other. Each struggles with the concept of reality in their own way: a time traveller, trying to determine if our universe is actually just a simulation, while others struggle to reconcile their existence and their experiences, to varying success.

The language of this novel is poetic. I felt drawn deeply into the various settings and the characters in them. The description of a pandemic definitely brought back my own memories, given it was written during the Covid-19 lockdowns, but just as easily I was transported to a moon colony, or northern Vancouver island in the 1800s. 

This book translated very well into audio, and I didn’t lose anything by accidentally reading it before The Glass Hotel, which I also adored. I wish it hadn’t taken me so long to read it!

Issued in a special 20th Anniversary edition, and with *quite* the prize list to its name, I’m surprised the first I’d heard of this book was scrolling through the Bespeak books available on Libby. Last year I read Shadow Life by Hiromi Goto, a funny and touching graphic novel about aging, autonomy, and our relationship with death, so I thought I’d check this out too.

Chorus of Mushrooms is a tale of three Japanese women living in rural Alberta: Naoe, who immigrated to Canada, her daughter Keiko, and Keiko’s daughter, Muriel. Each relates to their immigrant status in their own way: Naoe refuses to speak English and is firmly loyal to Japanese culture. Keiko is the opposite: going by the Westernized name “Kay” she only cooks Western food and refuses to speak Japanese or associate with the culture. Muriel is who ties them together: being raised by her mother, but connecting deeply with her grandmother without speaking Japanese. Nicknamed “Murasaki” by Naoe -- a name she ultimately adopts, she reconciles her family's immigrant experience and her existence as a Japanese-Canadian woman.

The format of this story is so interesting, switching between characters, but also second, first, and third person POV. Initially, I found it a little challenging to follow by audio, but I picked it up eventually. The book is a story within a story: Murasaki telling her unnamed boyfriend her family history, and it delves into fantasy realism and folktale along the way. The book takes a bit to work up, but by the end I was fascinated, entranced, and warmed by the three women’s stories. 

This is a wonderful, definitely underappreciated work of Canadian fiction. It explores the Canadian immigrant experience and women’s experiences so uniquely. If you’re looking to diversify your reading, track it down!