sophia_sol | Entries tagged with book theme: canada

A non-fiction book about racism and particularly anti-Black racism in Canada, by activist writer Desmond Cole.

I am a Canadian myself, but honestly, so much of the anti-racism rhetoric I hear is still so thoroughly based in a US context, given the English speaking media environment and online world are so US-dominated in a lot of ways. So it was helpful to read a book that was clearly and specifically talking about the Canadian context, with discussion about the Canadian activism being done and the Canadian police force's use of violence with impunity and the like. Canada likes to think of ourselves as being better than the US, but that's an extremely low bar and lets Canada think there's no work that needs to be done here when there's SO much that needs addressing.

A good and worthwhile read.

ughghghg this is...ok like. This is a romance novel that combines a) things I really like and think are well done, b) things that aren't really my thing but are common for romance novels so I can overlook them, c) things that are like, fine I guess, d) things that aren't handled super smoothly, and e) things that I hate SO SO MUCH.

As you might guess, this combination leaves me feeling a bit conflicted!

The novel is about a biracial woman named Gracie who happens to look a great deal like a famous Chinese actor (Fangli), who because of reasons needs someone to pretend to be her for a few months. Gracie then gets thrown into a world of what it's like to be rich and famous, and spending time with Fangli and her best friend Sam, and learning how to pretend to be someone else.

The premise of the book is pretty inherently silly, but that's fine, implausible set-ups are normal for romance novels and I can have fun with it. The voice is a breezy first-person-present-tense, which is probably my least favourite variety of narrative voice out of all the options, but that's becoming super common as well so here we are.

It was set in Canada, in Toronto, which is hypothetically a plus for me – I enjoy when I get to read a book that is actually set in the country I live in. But it felt in this book like Toronto was just a series of famous set-pieces, rather than being a real city, so that was a disappointment.

I liked the way the book handled Gracie's complexities of emotions over her relationship with her mother and the way it's affected her, and I appreciated the way Gracie and Fangli became friends so easily, and the stuff about Gracie's biracial identity seemed well-handled too. Also the mental health content. And overall I just liked all of the major characters, which takes me a great deal of a way into enjoying a book! Though the romance itself (between Gracie and Sam) was just like. Fine.

But the book spent a great deal of time putting me in positions of feeling like I had to cringe on behalf of the characters, which is NOT my jam, and then near the end, it went all in on a trope that I haaaaate whenever I come across it, which is ( cut for spoilers )

I don't know. It's good representation to exist in the genre, it's a quick and easy read, I can absolutely see it appealing to lots of people, but ultimately it did not live up to what I personally want out of a romance novel. (or a novel, period.) Ah well.

This is a nonfiction biography of a woman who was an amateur scientist in pretty much the end of the era when you could have a successful career publishing academic articles without formal credentials, and only the beginning of the era when women could have a successful career in academia. She was born to Swedish nobility, her first husband died in the Russian revolution, she was a nurse to the famous Dionne Quintuplets, and she spent decades living in a tiny cabin in the woods in northern ontario taking intensive observations of birds.

A fascinating woman! But obviously I read this book because BIRDS. And it does mostly focus on her life after she falls headfirst into what became her true life's work of studying and understanding birds. I loved reading about her passion, her efforts, her extensive correspondence with bird experts across north america, her growing and deep familiarity with all the birds of her area, her dedication to keeping careful records of everything she saw and heard. Some of the things she studied continue to be relevant to ornithologists today!

But one through-line in the book was Louise's knowledge of the declining numbers of songbirds over the years, even from the very earliest days of her birding efforts in the 1930's. She knew, too, that the declining numbers were due to human activity, and she mourned their loss. Near the end of the book, the reader is provided with some numbers of just how great the decline in songbirds has been from when Louise began her records to now in the 2020's and it is honestly heartbreaking. Even just within Louise's life, she talks about the obvious and stark change in the experience of the morning bird chorus. It brings me near tears to think of how things used to be! Between habitat loss in both breeding grounds and wintering grounds, the effects of herbicides and insecticides, disappearing food due to the collapsing insect population, and more, songbird presence is a shadow of what it once was.

The other important thing I learned from the book is that the things I want to know about birds ARE out there, I just need to acquire bird books that are focused on specific species or specific families, instead of field guides, if I want to know everything about a bird's life and behaviour. NOTED. My bird library WILL be growing.

A graphic novel telling a story in a series of character vignettes about the points of tension and points of connection in a small Mennonite community in southern Manitoba.

It's....hmm. It does a great job of giving an accurate and nuanced portrayal of the current state of the Mennonite community and the conversations of the current time in Canada (including: relationships with indigenous people and the history of residential schools; queer people's degree of welcome in churches; relationships with war and the military; dynamics between modern megachurches and more traditional churches; voluntourism; and more). I 100% believed in the realness of every single character in this book. And it left me unsettled at the end, but in a good way? idk the whole thing is somehow both melancholy and hopeful.

I do wish though that the book was saying something more though than just holding up a mirror to go "this is who we are." I mean there's value in that! But it wasn't quite enough for me. But maybe that's just, like, where we're at with fiction that actually explores Mennonite identity: there's so little Mennonite fiction out there that we can't get beyond just going for representation through depiction.

I also struggled in places to follow the story — although the art is great, it is not quite distinctive enough in how it depicts all the many different characters, and I had a huge amount of trouble following who was who as they interwove throughout each other's stories. And checking the character cheat sheet at the front didn't always help as much as I wanted it to.

I did love that the book is clearly by someone who at the very least knows birders, and might be a bird enjoyer himself. (but it doesn't go overboard on the bird content, just makes choices of what birds to include that aren't birds the average non-birder would have thought much about!)

Overall.... I'm glad I read it. I'm curious how it would read to someone who isn't intimately familiar with the things it's depicting, though!

Oof. The kind of book where you finish and have to just kind of sit in a daze for a while as you let it settle.

This is a graphic memoir by Kate Beaton of Hark! A Vagrant fame, about her two years working in the oil sands of Alberta when she was a fresh university graduate - a very young woman working in an isolated environment that was mostly men separated from their communities. It's a wonderful, nuanced look at a complicated and difficult place, and Kate's writing and art and impeccable sense of pacing do an amazing job of carrying you with her into the emotions of the moment, in everything she depicts.

Not sure what else to say about it, really. Book good. Very recommend. Content notes for sexual harassment and sexual assault.

Yes, it was time for yet another reread of The Blue Castle! I can never stay away for too long. This time I actually listened to a fan-made audiobook of it! It was delightful to experience it that way for a change, and the reader had a lovely rural ontario accent that's perfect for the book too. Though the files are unedited -- I think I need to take a pass through it all in audacity to even out some of the understandable stumbles in her reading, for when I inevitably listen to it again.

Each time I read The Blue Castle there's something new to pay attention to. Some of the things I thought about this time:

- Barney's friendship with Abel! It seems they have quite a habit of spending down-time together. What did Abel do with himself in the years before Barney came into town, or after Barney married Valancy and spent all his time with her instead? Abel must be real lonely, after Cissy dies and Barney disappears into wedded bliss.

( this one point is mild spoilers )

- Listening to the book instead of reading it meant I had more patience for the nature-descriptions part of the narrative, which was nice to discover, since there's rather a lot of that!

- And the last thing is.....back in January I went into a deep dive on investigating birth control availability in 1920's ontario because of this book. I read an entire master's thesis on the topic, as you do! Because I feel relatively confident that Barney and Valancy engaged in sexual activity, given the mentions of kisses and caresses and enjoying being held by your husband. But Valancy can't risk a pregnancy, given her health. So what did they do to prevent pregnancy?

Contraceptives were only legalized in Canada in 1969, which is kind of alarmingly recent, though the illegality allowed space for "when the public good required" which gave some doctors some leeway in providing contraception (and gave some doctors leeway into engaging in eugenics with their patients......).

Given what we see of Valancy and doctors, I feel confident Valancy would not have gone to a doctor to be fitted for a pessary, which was the main form of doctor-provided birth control available at the time. And although there's a chance Barney knows about condoms and knows where to find them, I also think it would be pretty unlikely they'd be able to get their hands on any in the rural Muskokas where they live during this year. Vaginal douching with lysol was a popular method of birth control in the 1920's-30's, but it was a) ineffective and b) dangerous, which is an unfortunate combination! Thankfully I don't think Valancy would have been susceptible to the kinds of advertising that lysol engaged in.

So my conclusion is that Valancy and Barney would be most likely to use natural birth control methods like pulling out, the rhythm method, or non-penetrative sex.

Now you know!!

Chris Hadfield is a Canadian astronaut who got more into the public eye than most astronauts these days due to an active twitter presence during his half-year on the ISS in 2012-2013. This is his memoir!

It's an interesting read, though it doesn't get super personal really. It's mostly just reading a reasonable guy chatting thoughtfully about helpful ways to approach living one's life. Who happens to be a highly-decorated and skilled astronaut, giving anecdotes about spaceflight and stuff.

And it means that my number one take-away from the book is.....what is it LIKE to be that mentally and emotionally stable and healthy????

This is absolutely a trait they select for in astronauts (for good reason!!) and then astronaut training puts a lot of effort into improving these skills too. So it makes sense that Hadfield would exude an aura of "chill competent with-it dude with a brain that doesn't act up." But my gosh. Wouldn't it be NICE.

Now, I'm not saying the guy's perfect or anything, like, you clearly need to have a lot of drive and ambition to become an astronaut, and if you read around the edges of the book you can see that all that drive focused towards reaching his goal put a lot of strain and pressure on his wife and kids. But you get the sense he's aware of the trade-offs he's made and made his choices with full knowledge, and did his best to mitigate the issues wherever he could, and truly listen when people told him there was a problem. And he also comes across as a guy who...would have been genuinely at peace with it if he'd put all this effort into living out his greatest dream and it didn't work out.

WEIRD.

(He's also the kind of person who, at 9 years old, realized he wanted to be an astronaut, realized it was a really really far-fetched goal, and decided that what made the most sense was to approach all of his choices in life based on what someone who would become an astronaut would be doing in that moment, figuring that it would be helpful if it ever became possible for him to reach his goal, but would still be useful to him even if he never became an astronaut. What the fuck.)

The premise behind this one as to why they have to pretend to be engaged.... and at the same time pretend they're not together.... it's a bit much!

Is it cute how much Reena and Nadim bond over both loving to cook food from their shared heritage? Sure! Is literally everything else about their relationship awkward to read about? Yup!

Anyway I want to know more about Reena's relationship with her sister, I was way more invested in that than in the romance. Nadim was toooooo suave and charming and charismatic and honestly kind of pushy, I do not trust him, he seems too slick. Even after he's been honest about his secrets finally!

A middle grade novel about two Indigenous foster kids who find a portal into another world! Morgan, the older kid, has been in foster care for as long as she can remember, bounced between a whole series of foster homes of varying quality, and she's really struggling. Eli is a year younger and has just entered foster care for the first time after losing his family, and is having a very different kind of tough time.

There are definite Narnia vibes to the story -- the kids go through a portal into a land of endless winter, meet talking animals, and end up trying to help them fix the winter problem. In this respect it kind of reminds me of the Birchbark House series (by Louse Erdrich), which is specifically written to tell an Indigenous focused story in response to the Little House series. If this is a trend then I am all for it!

Anyway I was barely into The Barren Grounds before I was extremely invested in Morgan being okay, she is so clearly a good kid trying her best but fucked up by her life experiences and acting out as a result, and so I was THERE for the rest of this book.

Eli and Morgan react to the land beyond the portal very differently, due to their very different experiences of their Indigenous identity, but it allows both of them a chance to explore that identity. It also gives them space to figure out how to get to know each other better and to bond with each other!

There are some awkward turns of phrase in this book that occasionally threw me off, but overall I think it's a really excellent book, and I just zoomed through it.

I've loved the two novels by Nalo Hopkinson I read, so I was really looking forward to this short story collection of hers, but it turns out I guess her short fiction doesn't work for me :( Some of the stories were more interesting to me than others, but none of them were stories that I completely liked, and a number of them I did not at all like.

My experience of her novels thus far is that it took me a while to get into them but once I was there I was very invested. Perhaps it's just that in short story form there isn't enough time for me to get into each new set of Hopkinson's characters and worlds, before it's over. Too bad!

As you may know if you read my book posts regularly, I am a wuss. And this is a work of apocalyptic fiction. And I am a wuss!! It's very tense and emotionally intense in places. It's really good though so I am glad I read it.

Set in a community of Anishinaabe people on a remote reservation in northern Ontario, when issues start occurring everyone's just like "ah yes just another day on the rez, of course the power's out and nobody's telling us what's up." But soon it becomes clear that the situation is bigger than just their community, and something they can't expect to be fixed anytime soon.

Something I appreciated about the perspective this book brings to the genre is that Indigenous people have already been through several apocalypses, brought upon them by the white colonizers. A recurring theme of the book is the various members of the community doing their best to learn their traditional ways and traditional language, when for many years Canadian governmental policies deliberately divorced them from being able to maintain their traditions and heritage. They have already been working to rebuild in a post-apocalyptic setting.

So as an elder in the community tells Evan, the main character, their people have survived the apocalypse before and they'll survive this new one too.

This is a short novel but it packs a lot in. And it doesn't bother with irrelevancies such as: what actually went wrong in the south, what's the cause of this particular apocalypse? There are other priorities!

My only criticisms are that the opening of the book is a little infodumpy, and the time skip near the end of the book is a little disorenting. It's also a little male-focused in a way that makes you think "ah yes a man definitely wrote this" but not in like, a "the man who wrote this hates and/or doesn't understand women" kind of way. But this book is excellent at doing the things it sets out to do, and I highly recommend it.

This book is a big mood, as they say. Have I ever mentioned on my blog that I'm probably autistic? Well I am. And this memoir - by an autistic person about her experiences with autism - is hella relatable. Oh, not all our symptoms are the same, and we have different life stories, but my overwhelming experience of reading the book was to feel like, "oh hi, I know you."

I actually have no idea how this book would read to a person not me, but it was a great read for a person who is me. I didn't take any big insights away from it, I didn't learn anything new, but sometimes it's just really nice to just spend the length of a book hanging out with someone whose way of being and expressing herself feels so comfortably familiar. And there were also definite moments of being like, "oh no that's TOO real, how dare" but in like, a good way.

Anyway. Recommended! A good book. Also apparently one of the Evergreen books for this year, so go me, I'm Literary or something.

How many times have I read this book? Let's, uh, let's not count.

( hmmm I guess this is spoilery musings )

A children's book that was given to my mom when she was young. In some ways it's a nice enough story about a preteen girl's life on a rural Canadian farm. But it's also very frustrating. A big deal is made of whatever it was that interrupted the friendship between Sarah's mother and Mrs Bolton, but then although the rift is repaired it's never made clear to the reader what actually happened and it's deeply frustrating. And it's rather ableist about a phsyically disabled secondary character, Linda. Also, the story is very evangelically christian with a lot of focus on characters Being Saved in a way that's clearly intended to send a message to its readers and it's a) uncomfortable and b) not very interesting. Overall, it could have been a sweet little kid's book but instead I end the book completely dissatisfied.

(also, when I read this book as a kid I was disappointed because the cover art seemed to promise it would be a horse book, but although there was horse content it wasn’t a Horse Book. Misleading marketing!!)

Cute sweet m/f romance, kinda awkward and a bit over-obvious, but with a good heart. Featuring: a young ceo who just wants his father to talk to him again, and a lonely woman who's living her dream of owning her own pie bakery.

I liked the side-plot of the female lead wanting to develop some friendships in her life, not just romance, but felt this theme was a little under-developed. I really appreciated how fully the narrative (and the love interest) support her in her job-related goals though.

And I definitely do feel that the romantic leads are well matched with each other and are likely to have a happy long-term relationship.

I enjoyed that this book was set in Canada, but this also contributed to the awkwardness, because it meant that that the author felt the need to explain things about Canada to the unfamiliar reader instead of just letting the Canadian details exist. (eg, explaining what a butter tart is!) Also, I know about the high degree of turnover of restaurants in Toronto and so I just cannot manage to believe that the heroine's going to have any kind of long-term success with her pie shop.

Overall: a pleasant enough way to pass the time, but unlikely to be a book I'll bother rereading in the future.

This is the second book in James Alan Gardner’s new series of modern-day superheroes in southern Ontario. Still don’t care about superpowered fight scenes and vampires and train heists and stuff, still have FIVE MILLION FEELS ABOUT THESE CHARACTERS AAAAAA.

The first book, All Those Explosions Were Someone Else’s Fault, was the origin story about four roommates who become superheroes. This one takes place ten days later, as they’re all working to get used to what it means to be superpowered. Each book is from a different one of their POV’s, and I believe the author intends to write one book for each character.

K, who was the POV character of the first book, is very self-analytical and interested in ideas on the nature of constructed identity. Also ze is genderqueer and I love zir very much.

Jools, who’s the POV character of this book, is…..a lot less self-analytical and a lot more of a hot mess. BUT I LOVE HER TOOOOOO!

Um. Yeah okay no I have nothing else to say about this book. I love the characters to a ridiculous degree, I want to keep hanging out with all of them, I can’t wait till the next book comes out (hopefully we do get a next book!), the end.

This last week I read seven romance novels in a row without noting down any kind of detailed thoughts about any of them to write proper posts about, because it was That Kind Of Week. I'll come back and finish tidying some of my backlogged book thoughts for posting later but figured I might as well just throw these up since I won't be able to make proper posts of them.

1. After The Wedding, by Courtney Milan - a reread of a truly excellent one, still adore it, still deeply want to know everything about Theresa's story following this novel because I care wayyyy too much about Theresa.

2. Briarley, by Aster Glenn Gray - a m/m retelling of Beauty and the Beast which was absolutely lovely and I approved of just about every choice the author made in how to adapt the original story.

3. Sweet Disorder, by Rose Lerner (Lively St Lemeston #1) - small-town politics involving a young widow being encouraged to remarry for voting reasons but she has her own personal stuff going on too, liked it a lot.

4. True Pretenses, by Rose Lerner (Lively St Lemeston #2) - a reread, still totally delightful, love everything about it.

5. Listen to the Moon, by Rose Lerner (Lively St Lemeston #3) - really interesting marriage-of-convenience story about a valet-turned-butler and a maid, really wish I'd had the wherewithal to write down more detailed thoughts about this one because it super deserves it, very much worth the read.

6. A Taste of Honey, by Rose Lerner (Lively St Lemeston #4) - sweet and cute but it didn't really speak to me.

7. The Blue Castle, by Lucy Maud Montgomery - an old favourite comfort-read which I don't allow myself to reread too often anymore for fear of wearing out the story in my mind but the situation was deserving of a reread and it hit the spot as it always does.

Does what it says on the tin! This book is a chapter-by-chapter overview of various important issues relating to the Indigenous population in Canada, so it doesn't do an in-depth look at anything but gives you a good starting place for understanding the realities and complexities. And then each chapter extensively cites sources for further research so it's a great jumping-off point for deeper learning if desired.

A bunch of the content in the book was stuff that I already knew in a vague way, so the book was helpful in solidifying that vague knowledge, and other content was new to me which was also helpful!

Also: it has very readable prose, which is absolutely not to be taken for granted in a book that's basically a 101-level textbook. I first picked it up at bedtime to glance at the first few pages to decide if I wanted to take it to work the next day as my lunch-break read, and looked up again 60 pages later, well past my bedtime. A GOOD SIGN. Except for the sleep deprivation.

Overall a strong and helpful introductory book for settler peoples in Canada.

Once upon a time when I was much younger I attempted to read Anne of Green Gables because a) it's deeply popular, and b) I loved Lucy Maud Montgomery's other books. But I failed miserably at getting through the first book because I COULD NOT HANDLE my embarrassment at watching Anne get into one scrape after another. So I came to the conclusion that the Anne books were forever lost to me.

But recentlyish I had a revelation at the hands of

verity that I could just....skip the books in which Anne is a scrape-prone child, and pick the series up later. So I did! (I also skipped later books that looked like they would be largely about the scrapes Anne's children get into.)

It took me a bit of time to warm up to Anne; she's a little too serious-minded, dreamy, and romantic for me to ever feel like I got her. But I enjoyed her books and I'm glad to have been able to get around to reading the parts of this series I can read!

( Under the cut: Anne of the Island, Anne of Windy Poplars, Anne's House of Dreams, and Rilla of Ingleside )

I picked this book up not because the premise intrigued me (it really didn't) but because it is a NEW NOVEL BY JAMES ALAN GARDNER. I've been a fan of Gardner's works since I was a teen, and he hasn't put a book out in twelve years, and his old books are all out of print and available only as ebooks these days, and I was half-convinced he was never going to publish another book again, but HEY. NEW BOOK BY JAMES ALAN GARDNER. Obviously I was going to be there.

I always particularly admired Gardner's writing for his excellent characterization work. He is great at writing characters you care about and who seem like real and complicated people, and his first-person POV does the best I've ever seen of making the POV matter, with the characterization of the POV character really affecting the way the story is being told and what the narrative is paying attention to.

So I grumbled to myself about this new book being about superheroes vs vampires/werewolves/etc (I don't particularly care about superheroes OR monsters or for that matter fights) but I knew that if I picked it up I would care about the characters.

And having read this book....yep, I definitely care about the characters! You got me again, James Alan Gardner.

PLUS. The main character is GENDERQUEER oh dang and I really relate. ( cut for spoilers )