fiction
To Me You Seem Giant
by Greg Rhyno I hate it when I’m right. I mean, it feels fine being right in general sense, but, in the context of a book that tries to surprise you, it tends to bring things to an unsatisfying conclusion, especially when the twist is presented as though it should have shattered your world. But…
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The Best Laid Plans
by Terry Fallis After five demoralizing years in Canadian politics, Daniel Addison decides to quit his job as speechwriter to the leader of the Opposition Liberals to start teaching English at the University of Ottawa. (The decision came shortly after unintentionally witnessing his girlfriend’s late-night “political discourse” with the House Leader.) But, as a last…
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The Handmaid’s Tale
by Margaret Atwood It’s interesting to me when similar techniques employed by different authors elicit vastly different responses from me. In the case of The Handmaid’s Tale, the ending is reminiscent of one such technique I loved from Omar El Akkad’s American War, in that the whole final chapter reads like a transcript from a…
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First Things First
by Diane Schoemperlen First Things First is a collection of early short stories by Schoemperlen, published from the mid-’70s––while studying English at Thunder Bay’s Lakehead University––up to the early ’90s. This wide breadth of publication gives a reader a bird’s-eye-view of the evolution of an author. And this isn’t to suggest the writing’s poor early…
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Indian Horse
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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The Kite Runner
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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Inherent Vice
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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The Lightkeeper’s Daughters
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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Bear
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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