Showing posts with label Essays. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Essays. Show all posts

#IMWAYR May 23, 2022

Welcome readers! It's #IMWAYR time again, when bloggers share what they have been reading and find out what others have been up to. Kathryn hosts the adult version of this meme at Book Date. Jen at Teach Mentor Texts and Kellee and Ricki at Unleashing Readers host the kidlit rendition. These are fabulous places to start your search for what to read next. 

How are you all doing? In spite of the miserable cold weather, I managed to get the vegetable garden planted. When I was at the nursery I also picked up a few flowering plants for the other gardens too. You can never have too much colour in the yard. 
It was a strange reading week for me. I finished a brilliant novel by TJ Klune, and then couldn't get into anything after that. I started listening to a number of books and gave up. I started reading a few titles with my eyes, but couldn't get into them either. Thank goodness I finally found a book that I could connect too. 
Here in Canada we are celebrating the Victoria Day Weekend. It's been quiet since we stayed home and our children did the same. I'm off on Tuesday to Vancouver where I will visit my grandchildren for a couple of sleeps before heading off to my annual Women's Weekend. 

Titles with a 🍁 indicate this is a Canadian or Indigenous Canadian Author and or Illustrator.

Clicking on the title will take you to the Goodreads page of the book.

NON FICTION PICTURE BOOKS 

Shortly after Sundar Paliwal became leader of his village in India, he lost one of his daughters. He decided to honour her by planting 111 trees. Then he convinced the villagers to plant 111 trees every time a girl child was born into the village. He brought in engineers from the city to organize an irrigation system to keep the trees alive in the desert climate. Aloe Vera was planted to protect the trees from termites and other pests. From these plants women created health products to sell. Within a short period of time the community's health and wealth grew. Today more than 25000 trees have been planted. The landscape and lives of girls have been radically altered. 
In addition, through a shared community investment strategy, Sundar Paliwal ensured that each girl would go to school and not be married off until she was 18. 
Rendered in watercolor, gouache, and graphite, Marianne Ferrer's illustrations are just gorgeous. 
Our world needs more people like Sundar Paliwal. 

GRAPHIC

4 stars

Roll With It by Lee Durfey-Lavoie & Veronica Agarwal October 5, 2021

Thanks to Max at Completely Full Bookshelf for introducing me to this title. 
It is a story about a young girl with anxiety/OCD issues. In spite of this, her new year in middle school starts out well. She makes a new friend, joins an after school club, and seems to be settling in well. Things at home are mostly good. 
On the down side, one of her sisters might be leaving home, and there seems to be some kind of low crawling creature/monster lurking outside the school. As her anxiety increases, she starts to have trouble finishing homework. 
Maggie is controlled by a kind of magical thinking. Upon arriving home from school she engages in a ritual of switching the lights on and off. She carries a 20 sided die with her and rolls it continuously to help her make decisions. Her parents suggest she see a therapist, but despite the evidence, Maggie insists she is fine. By the end of the book, she realizes she needs help and goes to see one 
I liked a lot about this book. I liked that we see how therapy helped Maggie. I liked the inclusion of the role playing game. It took me back to the days when my sons were engrossed in Dungeons and Dragons. (They still play, but now that they are fathers, less often.) I appreciated the incidental diversity in the characters. I also liked the information in the back matter about how the book was developed. 

ADULT NOVELS 


What happens when a not very nice man dies unexpectedly and doesn't want to move on into the afterlife? Read this and discover one possibility: a possibility full of hilarity, sweetness, rehabilitation and romance. 
I did not want this book to end.
I am now an unapologetic fan of T.J. Klune. 
While this is an adult novel, I would happily include it in a high school library. 

I have long been a fan of Joan Didion, but until listening to this collection of essays from her earlier life, had almost forgotten why. That woman could write! Didion made everything she wrote about seem fascinating. She challenges her readers to reexamine our own perceptions of subjects she addressed. Her essay on the media (written in 1968) feels scarily prescient for where we are today. 
Also, the introduction by Hilton Als is a brilliant overview of her life.

4 stars

Okanagan Geology South by Murray A. Roed and Robert J. Fulton (Editors) October 2017  🍁

I asked my partner a question about what mountain range we are part of, and he handed me this book. I finished it in one sitting. I suspect that people not acquainted with the area would not be as fascinated as I was to read about the area's geological history and existing features. Being able to make personal connections to the different areas written about made it all come alive. My one quibble about this book is that it was difficult to keep track of all the figures mentioned in the text. I also wish the index was more detailed. 

CURRENTLY

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro & Sara Siu (Narrator)
Cress Watercress by Gregory Maguire

UP NEXT 

Cold by Mariko Tamaki
An Elegant Defense: The Extraordinary New Science of the Immune System: A Tale in Four Lives by Matt Richtel

READING GOALS

#MustReadFiction 11/24 

#MustReadNonFiction 8/18 

Canadian Authors 29/100

Canada Reads shortlist 5/5 

Indigenous Authors 11/25

Goodreads Reading Challenge: 120 /250
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#IMWAYR November 22, 2021

Hello everyone. It's #IMWAYR time again, when readers share what they have been reading and find out what others have been up to in the past week. Kathryn hosts the adult version of this meme at Book Date. Jen at Teach Mentor Texts and Kellee and Ricki at Unleashing Readers host the kidlit rendition. Whatever you are looking forward to in your next great read, these are fabulous places to start your search.

It's been a wild week here in British Columbia and Washington State. BC is now in a state of emergency. Last weekend, from November 13th to November 15th, a level 5 atmospheric river dropped up to 250 millimetres (9.84 inches) of rain in some areas. Areas that didn't get that much, still ended up breaking all previous records for rainfall. This followed what was already one of the wettest months on record. Flooding and landslides have been intense across the province and state. Small towns have been nearly decimated. Vancouver, our largest city, was cut off from the rest of the country for a week because all the highways were closed. In one of the most important agricultural zones, Sumas lake, drained in the 1920's, has returned.

Photograph from Abbotsford News Nov. 17, 2021

The one route that finally opened up is for essential traffic only. Other routes won't be passable for at least a year, if ever. Here in my small town we were unscathed weather wise, but the usual self centred faction stormed grocery stores and cleaned out the produce, dairy, and toilet paper sections. 

In more positive news, the Governor General Literary Awards, "among Canada's oldest and most prestigious prizes for literature," were announced. Philippa Dowding won the Young People's Literature prize in the text category for Firefly, while David A. Robertson and illustrator Julie Flett won the illustrated books category, for their picture book, On the Trapline.

I finished up my advent calendars and mailed them off on Friday. I am keeping my fingers crossed that, now that the mail can get through, they will arrive in Vancouver before December 1st. Now I'm back to working on my second Olivier Dunrea quilt. 

Titles with a 🍁 indicate this is a Canadian or Indigenous Canadian Author and or Illustrator.

Clicking on the title will take you to the Goodreads page of the book.


A young Cree boy is hyper sensitive to noise. His Mosom, (grandfather) teaches him an indigenous strategy called mamaskasitawew that involves learning to listen for wonder.
Read my whole review to see some examples of Joshua Mangeshig Pawis-Steckley gorgeous artwork. 

NON FICTION PICTURE BOOKS


Emmy Noether (pronounced NER-ter) solved a problem in Einstein's Theory of Relativity that none of the existing male mathematicians could figure out, but you probably haven't heard of her. She ended up proving a number of other laws of physics, but remained essentially unknown. "She worked in a field of study that didn't welcome women, and her male colleagues didn't even think to give her credit when they used her work or included it in their own."
The back matter includes additional information about this amazing woman. 
Kari Rust's artwork is hand drawn and coloured digitally. 

NOVELS

5 stars

Linked by Gordon Korman July 20, 2021 🍁

I picked this up because Ms Yingling, who is more critical than I am, gave it 5 stars. I knew it had to be good and wasn't disappointed.
A swastika is painted on a school wall in a small town in Colorado. It sets off a series of events that results in students at the school working to create a paper chain 6 million links long, to represent the number of Jews killed during the Holocaust. In spite of this, swastikas continue to show up. 
This novel is told through the perspectives of a number of students at the school. The creation of the chain, uncovering the truth about the communities racist past, and discovery of the swastika painter, transforms them and their community. 
Gordon Korman is proving himself to be a noteworthy author. While this novel contains his characteristic humour, it addresses serious issues in ways that make them approachable for his readers. I adore this quote, "A paper chain can be done when it hits certain number of links. But tolerance is a project you always have to keep working at."


This is an adult novel told through the voice of Swiv, a nine year old. Three generations of women live together. Swiv's pregnant mother, an actress, tries to take care of all of them.
It's a book about intergenerational love. It's full of family stories told to Swiv that bring us close to each member of the family - including Swiv's absent father. It's about the relationship between a girl and her grandmother. In a family full of characters, this grandmother steals the show. She's a role model for all of us aging women.
I laughed. I cried. Sometimes at the same time.
Now that I am a grandmother, I am a sucker for stories of intergenerational relationships. I'm certain I would have loved this book even without that connection.

5 stars

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr with Marin Ireland & Simon Jones (Narrators) September 28, 2021

It took me a bit to really get into this book. Mostly just until I got all the different characters and stories right. Then I could hardly stop listening.
Doerr takes characters from across time - starting with Anna and Omeir during the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and moving forward to the future with 14 year old Konstance, the last of a group of humans travelling across space in search of a new planet. Between them is Zeno, a gay man born in the 1940, and Seymour, from the present day, who doesn't fit in and finds solace in wilderness (he might be on on the autism spectrum).
What ties them all together is a fictional novel about Aethon, a shepherd who is magically transformed into different creatures in his search for Cloud Cuckoo Land. It's credited to Antonius Diogenes, a real author from around 100 CE.
There is a lot going on in this book. At the same time as Anthony Doerr braids together the stories of the different characters, he weaves in multiple themes. He highlights heroes, environmental degradation, our attitudes towards those who are different, the importance of libraries and librarians, and ultimately, the power of story.

I've taken my sweet time reading this eclectic collection of essays because each one is a treasure. Some, like those about Pard, Ursula K. Le Guin's cat, are pure sweetness. Others, like those about the declawed and defanged lynx, broke my heart. Maybe it's because I am getting on in years myself, that I found her essays on aging to be profound. Permeating all of them is tenderness and a wry sense of humour.
These essays are taken from the blog she wrote in the last years of her life. They prove that not only was Le Guin one of the worlds finest science fiction and fantasy authors, she is one of our finest authors.
This is a book I now want to own. It's a book I'm hoping to gift 

CURRENTLY

Living With Viola by Rosena Fung
Foxglove Summer by Ben Aaronovitch
Aristotle and Dante Dive Into the Waters of the World by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

UP NEXT 

All Boys Aren't Blue by George M. Johnson

& more picture books from my #MustReadList

UPCOMING BLOG POSTS

Living With Viola by Rosena Fung

PROGRESS ON MY READING GOALS

#MustReadIn2021 29/25 

#MustReadNFIn2021 12/12 

#MustReadPBIn2021 66/100 

Big Book Summer Challenge 9 

Books by Canadian Indigenous Authors 36/25

Books by Canadian Authors: 108/100

Canada Reads 2021 5/5 

Discworld Series 41/41

Goodreads Reading Challenge: 394/333 


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