by Richard Wagamese Indian Horse follows Saul Indian Horse as his life takes him from a northern Ojibway reserve through the world of the the White Man and all the abuse and racism it forces him to endure. After a hopeless life in a residential school, he gets a taste of joy and salvation in…
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by Khaled Hosseini Lately, on-the-nose dialogue and overt writing in fiction has really been grating on me in my reading. This isn’t to say that either of these related issues are the worst offenders in literature, but they’re usually enough to hurt the story, enough to change what could have been great into just something…
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by Thomas Pynchon Pynchon is another author I’ve been meaning to read for a long time now. Though I probably should have asked around before picking up the only novel of his I recognized by title, that “Alex luck” I seem accustomed to caused that same book to be what is widely considered one of…
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by Jean E. Pendziwol The Lightkeeper’s Daughters follows Elizabeth, a blind woman living at a nursing home, and Morgan, a teen forced to perform community service cleaning the graffiti she spray-painted on the nursing home’s fence. After Elizabeth’s father’s old journals are recovered from a shipwreck, she enlists Morgan to help her go through them,…
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by Marian Engel I think I should start things off by warning that this isn’t Claire Cameron’s The Bear, as people seem to immediately think when I bring up Engel’s book. No, this is that book that fell off of everyone’s radar in recent years, despite my understanding that it was at least somewhat controversial…
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by Steven Martin I think I’m far too impressionable, and arguably for the wrong reasons. I mean, if I was picking up good habits and useful knowledge it’d be one thing, but it was only in the midst searching up opium pipes on eBay that I really had to stop and think about what I…
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by P. G. Wodehouse In Something Fresh, the absent-minded Lord Emsworth of Blandings Castle unintentionally walks off with the prized scarab from the collection of the American billionaire, J. Preston Peters. Though Peters wants it back, he doesn’t want to cause a scandal by accusing Emsworth of theft. For, not only did Emsworth, finding the…
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by Aldous Huxley In the future, everybody’s happy except Bernard Marx. Despite the selective breeding and the constant conditioning throughout his entire life, he doesn’t seem to fit in. (He prefers solitude to company, and he’s hardly promiscuous, so he’s quite a weirdo in this “ideal” society. People gossip that his problems stem from alcohol…
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by Micah Pawluk While Pawluk covers a range of topics in his debut poetry collection, A Boy from the Woods, the vast majority of the book concerns his thoughts on love. The author often groups poems with similar ideas and themes together, occasionally growing and building off of the previous ones in a narrative fashion,…
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by Kurt Vonnegut Vonnegut was a man who loved to skirt the line between science fiction and fantasy with at least a few of his books, and Galápagos isn’t an exception here, in this case marrying evolutionary theory with a ghost narrator. The story concerns a small group of people who find themselves marooned on…
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