It doesn’t matter how many kerplows, superpowers or evil villains you stuff into a graphic novel—if it doesn’t have a sense of humanity and a strong heart, who cares?
Sue Carter Flinn/The Coast
Our cabbie likes to mix things up by reading both fiction and nonfiction; new releases and older volumes; serious tomes and lighter fare; and, of course, a healthy helping of whatever people leave in the back of his cab. Here’s a list of what Will Grozier loves right now, books that captivate whether you’re poring over them on the beach or sampling them on a short taxi ride.
NPR
Growing up in downtown Tel Aviv, Avi Friedman got a sense of what a real neighbourhood is all about: urban living on a human scale. The family’s fourth-floor apartment was in a Bauhaus building that was classic mixed-use: stores at street level, apartments and offices above. School was around the corner and so was a large public market. It’s the kind of environment that Friedman, now 58 and an established Montreal architect and author, has sought out ever since.
JEFF HEINRICH/The Gazette
Principally, what makes this lecture series good, is Spurgin’s strong and thoughtful suggestion that reading fiction is an art in something like the way that writing fiction is an art. He introduces what he calls a set of tools that can be used by the reader to think about a piece of fiction during reading.
NSCAD graduate and Burning Rock member Lisa Moore is the reigning queen of CanLit. Few writers can match her evocative, elegant way with words, and for that she is a multi-award-winning author, twice nominated for the country’s most esteemed literary award: the Giller Prize.
February is her latest novel, said to be her masterpiece, and Salty Ink certainly thinks so.
I realize that this gift may be redundant—John Steffler having been the Parliamentary Poet Laureate a few years ago. (If you already have a copy, perhaps you wouldn’t mind passing this one along to another parliamentarian.) The Grey Islands should be as inescapable for Canadians as Walden is for those south of the border, an iconic book that sets dramatically before us, in a way that is richly complex, at once meditative and entertaining, the difficult and essential encounter with wilderness.
A love story on a grand scale, Therefore Choose is set in a world where a single choice can affect the direction of a life, a country, or even a continent. Facing decisions that will forever alter the course of their lives, George, Anna, and Werner must choose and live with the irrevocable consequences.
I would like to be home in Toronto for the publication of my book but, due to a cloud of volcanic ash, I am involuntarily confined to Europe at least until the weekend.
In The Amazing Absorbing Boy, Maharaj takes a look at immigration from the POV of a young man, forced into moving to Canada after the death of his mother. His father had moved to Canada years previously, and now Samuel finds himself in a small Regent Park apartment in Toronto with a stranger who could charitably be described as ‘cold.’ Samuel is the prototypical stranger in a strange land, fish out of water hero; alone, frightened, resourceful, and very confused as to what a typical Canadian might be.
Canadians already read Margaret Atwood. Was there any person actually interested in Canada Reads who hadn’t read The Handmaid’s Tale? Ditto Life of Pi, ditto The Stone Angel, ditto A Fine Balance, ditto A Complicated Kindness. Again, I do not mean to disparage these novels; I unreservedly love Handmaid and Life of Pi, I dig Complicated, I’ve never even read Balance, and my views on Stone Angel are likely distorted by the overall unhappiness of my high school years and cannot be trusted.
