WORD UNDER THE STREET
You know when you see a stranger on the subway immersed in a book and you’re just dying to know what they’re reading? Well, Geoffrey Vendeville asked for you
Robert Aubow, 21, student and entrepreneur Book: Business is ART by Jon Umstead
Stop: Queen’s Park Aubow is developing a mobile app, but is keeping the details of his business idea under wraps for now. For help turning the idea into reality, he turned to Business is ART by Jon Umstead, a business consultant in Urbana, Ohio. “It teaches you that you need to have a vision, build towards it and break it up into smaller projects,” Aubow said.
Mike Mondoux, 29, ESL teacher Book: Invasion: The Alternate History of the German Invasion of England, July 1940 by Kenneth Macksey
Stop: Dundas In this alternative history, Kenneth Macksey, a veteran and historian of the Second World War, speculates about what might have happened if Nazi Germany had invaded England. Mondoux found the book among his late grandfather’s collection. His grandfather loved to read about Winston Churchill and the war, Mondoux said. Macksey’s work is “depressing actually, but interesting nonetheless. Maybe a little unrealistic,” he said. “He kind of shows the Nazis as invincible, but I read a little history into this and most generals at the time considered the invasion to be impossible.” Linda Lin, 33, nurse Book: Ru by Kim Thuy Stop: College Lin favours books that have a “quality of redemption,” she said, “something that gives you hope and makes you feel better.” She’s currently reading Kim Thúy’s debut novel, Ru. The author was born in Saigon and fled Vietnam at 10 with her family, eventually settling in Montreal. Ru (Vietnamese for “lullaby”) is a memoir with some fictional elements that traces a young girl’s journey from Saigon to Quebec. The book’s success — it won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Frenchlanguage Fiction in 2010 — exceeded Thuy’s expectations.
Megan McGowan, 22, student Book: Cry of the Kalahari by Mark and Delia Owens
Stop: St. Andrew Over the summer, McGowan celebrated her parents’ 50th birthdays in Botswana as a family. They filled two 32 GB memory cards with pictures of giraffes, lions, hyenas, elephants and rhinos. Many years ago, American zoologists Mark and Cordelia Owens observed lions and hyenas in the same area. They reportedly met as grad students at the University of Georgia and auctioned off their possessions to buy one-way tickets to Africa, recording their experience in Cry of the Kalahari.