EIGHT GREAT BOOKS TO KEEP YOU ON THE EDGE OF YOUR CHAIR
With the season of added reading time upon us, the age-old readers’ question once again looms: What to bring to the beach, or to one’s beach equivalent?
The heavy hitters do a goodenough job of selling themselves: Arundhati Roy’s The Ministry of Utmost Happiness has been received as if the little matter of a 20-year hiatus had never happened; George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo underlines his stature as the most vital U.S. writer currently working; Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is reaching a new generation through Bruce Miller’s TV adaptation. But there are, of course, legions of others equally worthy. Based on the premise that a good read is a good read, beachtailored or otherwise, here is an assortment of titles — leaning toward literary non-fiction simply because it’s been an uncommonly rich time in that category — to pack along with the sunscreen:
UNCOMFORTABLY HAPPILY Yeon-Sik Hong Drawn & Quarterly
This is one of the best debut graphic novels of recent years. A young Korean couple decide to escape the hubbub of megalopolis Seoul to make a go of living in the countryside. In Hong’s hands the story — inspired by the author’s own experience with his partner — unfolds at an easy pace, one that respects the rhythm of the seasons and the gradual learning of elemental lessons. The drawing, childlike in its depiction of people and lush in its portrayal of their natural backdrops, draws us into the everyday details of a world where the old is threatened by the new yet is still there for the looking. This book is a brick, but that’s not a problem. You’ll want to linger in Hong’s world as long as you can.
NO IS NOT ENOUGH: RESISTING THE NEW SHOCK POLITICS AND WINNING THE WORLD WE NEED Naomi Klein Knopf Canada
From 1999’s No Logo through 2014’s climate bellwether This Changes Everything, Naomi Klein has had a way of rallying a huge readership around the defining issues of the day. No Is Not Enough finds her at perhaps her most topical. This is a book conceived in response to the political advent of Donald Trump and dedicated to counteracting the forces he has exploited and unleashed. Proceeding through the book’s point-by-point takedown of the Trumpian ethos, it hits you that he is no isolated phenomenon but rather the logical extension of a trend Klein has been warning us about for years. Trump, she posits, represents the personal branding of politics and the establishment of a hegemony that can’t be brought down by scandal because it is openly immoral in the first place. This is not a cheery book, then, but it bears the bracing properties of a writer speaking truth to power.
THE HANDOVER Elaine Dewar Biblioasis
For Canadians of a certain age, and indeed for anyone invested in the idea of a homegrown national culture, the knowledge that McClelland & Stewart is no longer a truly Canadian publisher strikes close to the heart. The Handover sees Elaine Dewar performing a forensic dissection of how this once-unthinkable situation came to pass while we weren’t looking. The book’s subtitle functions as a synopsis: “How bigwigs and bureaucrats transferred Canada’s best publisher and the best part of our literary heritage to a foreign multinational.” You might expect such a subject to lend itself to a dry, legalese treatment, but in the hands of the crusading Dewar it instead reads like a real-life thriller, fuelled by righteous indignation. It’s also a wake-up call to protect what’s left.
THE LONGEST YEAR Daniel Grenier Arachnide/Anansi
This is a genre-mashing historical/magical-realist novel that delves into a little-explored corner of the French Canadian diaspora. Brossard-born Grenier tells the story of the Langlois family: a Québecois father, his U.S. wife and their son Thomas, in the Tennessee Appalachians of mid-19th century. Into this milieu Grenier introduces an element of the fantastic: Thomas ages only one year out of four — and no, this is no mere case of being born on February 29th, although that is indeed Thomas’s birthday. It’s a risky conceit that pays off, allowing Grenier to spread his purview over multiple centuries and link events from the Plains of Abraham to the U.S. Civil War to the present day. Think David Mitchell, and closer to home, think Catherine Leroux. As L’année la plus longue Grenier’s book was a finalist for nearly every French-language award in 2015; in Pablo Strauss’s translation it deserves just as much attention in English.
ROAD THROUGH TIME: THE STORY OF HUMANITY ON THE MOVE Mary Soderstrom University of Regina Press
Mary Soderstrom doesn’t lack for ambition. The Montreal writer known as a novelist and for her books on gardening and urban studies, has now taken on a subject that allows her to combine deep scholarship with her own extensive travel experience. The result is a book that manages to turn a vast range of concerns — humankind’s everbroadening methods of transport, starting all the way back at foot and horseback, and their impact on the planet — into a tight, entertaining and even moving blend of history, science, and memoir.
WORKING FOR THE COMMON GOOD: CANADIAN WOMEN POLITICIANS Madelyn Holmes Fernwood Publishing
If you’ve seen the new Canadian 10-dollar bill, in circulation since the beginning of June and officially launched on July 1, you may have noticed, among the iconographic company of John A. Macdonald, George-Étienne Cartier and James Gladstone, the face of a woman who for most Canadians will have been all but unknown until now: Agnes Macphail. An indefatigable campaigner for the rights of women and society’s oppressed in general, Macphail became the first woman elected to the House of Commons in 1921. She is one of eight trailblazers whose stories are told by Madelyn Holmes in Working for the Common Good. Justin Trudeau’s genderbalanced cabinet, admirable a statement as it is, could not have happened without the efforts of women like Macphail, Thérèse Casgrain, Pauline Jewett, and Audrey McLaughlin. That the writer who has given them their due is American is a delightful irony.
MONTREAL 1909 Robert N. Wilkins Shoreline A STAIN UPON THE LAND: LOVE AND DEATH IN OLD MONTREAL John Kalbfleisch Shoreline
Finally, two books from an estimable long-running West Island indie make for ideal additions to the Montreal 375th shelf. Robert N. Wilkins’ Montreal 1909 draws extensively on the archive of the old Montreal Star for a time-warp deep-dive into a typhoid-gripped Edwardian city that modern readers will find familiar in some ways and irretrievably strange in others. Longtime Gazette columnist John Kalbfleisch’s A Stain Upon the Land: Love and Death in Old Montreal examines one of the great unsolved crimes in the city’s history: the 1827 shooting and killing of flour inspector and merchant Robert Watson in his home. Kalbfleisch’s blending of fact and fiction — the book is nominally a murder mystery, but with a strong historical underpinning — proves the perfect approach to a story whose real-life resonances are still felt today. This is a book that paints an illuminating picture of a time and place even as it serves up genre thrills.