An epic story of the Western Rocky Mountains, with the setting of Gateway (actually Canmore). The story covers 100 years, from 1911 with guides taking pack-horse expeditions into the mountains. The core story is the disappearance of an American fossil-hunting expedition. The history of Canadian National Parks is presented as an evocative back story. This is a very good read, capturing the romance (literal and figurative) of mountains and the men and women who blazed the trails.
Category: Location / Setting
The Past – Tessa Hadley
This is a perfect introspective story of family relationships in the present and past. There are secrets, things that are observed but not spoken of. The point of view of the children is most extraordinary – what they observe and what they keep secret. This is a very English story with some surprises – overall a very fine read.
A Little Life – Hanya Yanagihara
This is a powerful and also profoundly disturbing book, a guy book about 4 male college friends, with a detailed (1352 pages in my digital library copy) account of their relationships with each other mostly: intense friendship and sometimes love. There are essentially no important relationships with women. At the core of the book is Jude, who undergoes horrific abuse as a child that will bring you to tears. Predictably, Jude suffers pronounced attachment disorder which makes his subsequent relationships with his friends very complicated. One of the brilliant features of this book is the ability to illustrate how someone who is very very intelligent can repeatedly engage in completely irrational behaviour: Jude knows this but can’t stop. This should produce a pause in those who think that abuse can be trivialized by “just get over it”. This is a tough read for emotional reasons but very worthwhile. This book is a Man Booker finalist.
The Girl With All The Gifts – MR Carey
A variation on zombies: a fungus has created the “hungries”. Twenty years after the outbreak, there are very few survivors but this includes some children who have the infection but retain brain function, especially the ability to learn. Not surprisingly, these children are the subject of intensive scientific investigations in a secret army location. The best aspect of this book is the treatment of the sociology of an infection. A major part of the book details a journey with a disparate group of distrustful people who have to cooperate. Overall, a very interesting story.
The Sky Is Falling – Caroline Adderson
Adderson writes perfect novels of time and place, in this case Vancouver in the early 1980s. A group of young people share a home in Kitsilano, and the description of their lifestyle is fantastic. They are preoccupied (obsessed) with concern about war and the nuclear arms race, and their confusion and angst drives the plot. This is an under-rated novel, so highly recommended.
Slade House – David Mitchell
An imaginative story about soul vampires who lust for immortality. Parts of this book are similar to The Bone Clocks, but the story is much shorter, more like a novella.
Amy notes: David reads so voraciously that I rarely get to say this: I read this book before him!
The Mandibles – A Family 2029-2047 – Lionel Shriver
Shriver writes impeccable novels about contemporary issues: the obesity epidemic (Big Brother), health care costs (So Much For That), and a mass killing (We Need To Talk About Kevin) and others (Double Fault is a favourite of mine). In this novel, she describes the near future (2029 and beyond) after the financial collapse of America. Her focus is on 4 generations in a family, so the psychological aftermath is even more chilling. This is an excellent read and very relevant post-2008 financial collapse; what if things had progressed downhill even more dramatically .
Do Not Say We Have Nothing – Madeleine Thien
Thien has written some fine books (Dogs At The Perimeter, Certainty), but this new book is her best yet – an epic story of China. The evocative writing describes the agony of the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s leading up to the horror of the Tiananmen Square massacre. There are three central characters that are linked by their passion for music.
The coda at the end of the book describes the first time a lost composition for violin and piano is played: “At first, the violin played alone, a series of notes that slowly widened. When the piano entered, I saw a man turning in measured elegant circles, I saw him looking for the centre that eluded him, this beautiful centre that promised an end to sorrow, the lightness of freedom. The piano stepped forward and the violin lifted, a man crossing a room and a girl weeping as she climbed a flight of steps; they played as if one sphere could merge into the other, as if they could arrive in time and be redeemed in a single overlapping moment. And even when the notes they played were the very same, the piano and violin were irrevocably apart, drawn by different lives and different times. Yet in their separateness, and in the quiet, they contained one another”.
This book has great story telling with some transcendent writing – highly recommended.
Mexican Hooker #1: And My Other Roles Since the Revolution by Carmen Aguirre
Aguirre previously wrote “Something Fierce“, about her revolutionary life in South America after the Chilean coup that killed Allende’s socialist revolution. Something Fierce won the CBC Canada Reads competition in 2012. This new book travels back and forth in time between South America and Vancouver, so both before and after her first book. But the central focus of this book is on the aftermath of a brutal and horrific sexual assault in Vancouver when she was 13 years-old. Her rape was a violent and degrading act of power and aggression, not a sexual act per se. I had the privilege of seeing Aguirre act in an ATP play in September 2013. What I learned from this book is that she had attended a parole hearing for her rapist during the run of this play (he was being held in Bowden Prison). This is an extremely powerful and at times profoundly disturbing book and is not for the faint-hearted, but Aguirre eloquently outlines her path to forgiveness (of herself) and reconciliation.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26067164-mexican-hooker-1
What David Read 