August Random KIT - Canada!

The book we read for August Random CAT will be related to Canada in some way. The author may be Canadian, it may a novel set in Canada, it may be about any non-fiction subject related to Canada.

There are many fine Canadian novelists. Just a few are:
Margaret Atwood
Saul Bellow
Robertson Davies
Emma Donoghue
William Gibson (Science Fiction)
Elizabeth Hay
Helen Humphreys
Wayne Johnston
Yann Martel
Lucy Maude Montgomery
Tom Rachman
Mariko Tamaki (YA graphic novels)
Richard Wagamese (also essayist)

And a few Mystery writers:
Kelly Armstrong
Linwood Barclay
Giles Blunt
Alan Bradley
Maureen Jenning
Louise Penny

And Nonfiction includes:
Malcolm Gladwell
Wab Kinew (memoir)
Rick Mercer
Farley Mowat (environmentalist/naturalist)
Daniel Heath Justice

If you have any recommendations, please post them!

Great cat! I think I'm going to read Obasan by Joy Kogawa. It's about the internment of the Japanese in Canada during WWII.

I have got at least two books by Canadians sitting on my virtual TBR shelves:

Broken Promise by Linwood Barclay and Hands Like Clouds by Mark Zuehlke

My book club is reading The Handmaid's Tale in October, so it's probably a bit early to read it yet.

Excellent. I have an Atwood on the list for next month, so that'll fit just fine.

I may read the next in the Constable Molly series by Vicki Delany set in British Columbia.

I’ll be reading something from one of my favorite authors, Helen Humphreys.

I have so many choices for this category! Decisions, decisions.

I've been meaning to read Lies My Memory Told Me by Canadian author Sacha Wunsch, so that'll be my pick!

I am planning on reading Where the Air is Sweet by Tasneem Jamal, who emmigrated to Canada in 1975 from Uganda. I also have Who Do You Think You Are? by Alice Munro on my TBR pile.

I've taken a couple of BBs for Richard Wagamese and will probably read Medicine Walk.

I'm already planning to read Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro for AuthorCAT which will nicely fit here also.

Love this theme! I have a lot to choose from so will have to think about what I feel like reading :)

Yay! Being Canadian, I have lots of Canadian stuff on the tbr.

So, it will be a matter of either picking something that also fits another challenge, or maybe picking something that I have a hard time fitting in (ones with few tags, since I use tagmashes to choose what I read for each challenge).

On my list for August is Blue Castle by L. M. Montgomery, who is a Canadian author.

Oh, I was considering Five Little Indians by Michelle Good for AuthorCAT, and it fits AlphaKIT well, too.

If I can get my hands on it, she's Canadian, so I will read that. I may read others, too.

I will probably read something by L.M. Montgomery, since I have a shelf full of her books. I visited the Anne of Green Gables house when we were in Canada a few years ago, and it was a good experience. The visit meant more to me than to my spouse, as he had not read the book and I had to explain things to him.

>16 LadyoftheLodge: Anne with an “E”.

>17 booksaplenty1949: LOL! Nice catch - I hadn't noticed!

>1 clue: You have the wrong touchstone for Richard Mercer. The author of A nation worth ranting about and others is generally known as Rick Mercer.

After searching through my collection I've decided to read A Cunning Man by Robertson Davies that has been on the tbr list for too long.

Here are some of my favourite Canadian authors not mentioned already.

Fiction writers:
André Alexis
Joseph Boyden
Michael Crummey
Kim Echlin
Esi Edugyan
Timothy Findley
Mavis Gallant
Thomas King
Margaret Laurence
Marie-Renée Lavoie
Mary Lawson
Hugh MacLennan
Alistair MacLeod
W.O. Mitchell
Alice Munro
Beth Powning
Miriam Toews
Guy Vanderhaeghe

and mystery writers:
William Deverell
Howard Engel
Chris Hadfield
John McFetridge
Robert Rotenberg
Inger Ash Wolfe
Eric Wright

>17 booksaplenty1949: Thanks! LOL! Anne would love it.

I am also considering a reread of some of the Canadian West novels by Janette Oke.

>20 VivienneR: Thanks, got it!

Midnight at the Dragon Cafe by Judy Fong Bates was great and she has two other books. Judy came to Canada from China as a young child.

>22 clue: Those well-used names can be tricky. :)

What I'd like to know is how you posted author names that open a pop-up box with a mouseover? I know changes have been made to touchstones recently but I missed that one.

I think I'll read Wild Dogs by Helen Humphreys. I read The Lost Garden for the May RandomKit and loved it.

> 24 I didn't do anything different, it must be a new feature? I just used brackets. It seems like this was something that I have had in the past, either as a trial or something I could turn off?

>25 VioletBramble: I loved The Lost Garden by Helen Humphreys too!

I'm tentatively planning on Warlight by Michael Ondaatje and No Time for Goodbye by Linwood Barclay.

I may read The silvered by canadian author Tanya Huff. I’ve read a few of her books this year because they fit different challenges, but it seems to one of the few books by a canadian author I currently have on my shelves that I haven’t read already.

I want to read one of my ROOT books for this challenge (ROOT=on my shelves, unread, for more than a year), discovered Farley Mowat's Grey Seas Under fit the bill!

>28 fuzzi: Ooh I really enjoyed that one! I hope you like it :)

I read The Walker on the Cape which is a Sgt. Windflower mystery set in Canada.

I raced through Medicine Walk by Richard Wagamese.

I read In a Field of Blue by Gemma Liviero which takes place only partly in Canada where a shell-shocked WWI veteran/deserter flees. I am going to attempt to also read Obasan about the Canadian internment of the Japanese during WWII, if time permits.

The Cunning Man by Robertson Davies

The entire story is framed as a newspaper interview that causes the elderly narrator, Dr. Jon Hullah, to remember his life through anecdotes and philosophical discussion much of it told in a gossipy tone. He delved into many topics: church, war, sex, family, medicine, even a joke told to him by an acquaintance that he recognized as a retelling of a Rabelais story. He lost my interest in a few spots, but was otherwise fascinating. This is a terrific accomplishment for Davies that came to be his unplanned last hurrah.

I've finished No Time for Goodbye by Linwood Barclay, a very good suspenseful novel that's hard to put down.

>34 clue: That was the first one I read by him. It made my favourites that year. A few others by him have also later made my favourites, but "No Time for Goodbye" might remain my favourite overall.

Completed The Testaments by Margaret Atwood. I actually liked this better than its precursor, The Handmaids Tale.

She is a Canadian author and it is set in Ontario

Remembering the Bones / Frances Itani
3.5 stars

79-year old Georgie is on her way to the airport as she has been invited by Queen Elizabeth to their shared 80th birthday celebration. Unfortunately, Georgie’s car goes off an embankment and lands in a ravine. Georgie is alive, but too hurt to move from where she landed and she and her car are not visible from the road. As she waits for rescue, she goes through memories of her family and her life.

This was good. The initial crash brought me in and although the memories initially weren’t as interesting, I found it picked up a bit when Georgie got married, so I liked the second half of the story better. I also liked the comparisons to “Lilibet’s” (Queen Elizabeth’s) life and the little royal tidbits brought in that way. I thought it was amusing that all the women in Georgie’s family had names that shortened into “male” names: Phil, Fred (she had an Aunt and Uncle Fred when her Aunt Fred married a Fred), Grand Dan… (ok, not quite all, but most).

And the wiki can be found here:
https://wiki.librarything.com/index.php/RandomKIT_2022#August:_Canada.21

:-)

>37 LibraryCin: I have friends, a married couple, who are both Sandy.

I have completed my read of Who Do You Think You Are? by 2013 Pulizer Prize winner Alice Munro. I really enjoyed these interconnected short stories.

I have also completed Where the Air is Sweet by Tasneem Jamal. This is a semi-autobiographical novel about how in the 1970s dictator Idi Amin forced all Asian citizens out of Uganda.

I’ve finished Coventry by Helen Humphries.

Finished Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood, which is also set in Canada.

The Castleton Massacre: Survivors' Stories of the Killins Femicide / Sharon Cook, Margaret Carson
4.5 stars

In May 1963, Robert Killins, a very intelligent man and a former United Church minister, murdered his (estranged) wife, his daughter, his sister, and his wife’s youngest daughter. He’d been stalking his wife and daughter for years since wife Florence tried to leave and travelled across the country from B.C. to Ontario to get away. His wife and daughter were both pregnant at the time of the murders. Two more of Florence’s children watched in horror as the murders happened, and were able to get away. They were 12- (Margaret) and 10-years (Brian) old at the time.

The book backs up in time to give a biography of both families – beginning with Robert’s and Florence’s parents, then Robert and Florence and their siblings and everything leading to 1963. It also included a section after the murders where Margaret and Brian came to live with their Uncle Harold and his wife and their youngest daughter (a teenager, the only child still living at home), Sharon, and the two tried to come to terms with what had happened and what they’d witnessed. The last bit of the book also talks about domestic abuse in Canada, in general. Margaret and Sharon are the authors of the book. They undertook a lot of research and got oral histories from many of the people still alive who remember it.

Wow! First a bit of advice – don’t read the chapter that describes the murders close to bedtime! It was terrifying and violent. With one of the authors having been there and the oral histories given by her brother who was also there and a couple of other people who tried to help, all put together, you get an awful feeling of being hunted (as I’m sure both Margaret and Brian felt)! That being said, I am a fan of true crime, and I do like biographies, so all put together, a very very good book. And murders I had never heard of before this.

I read Her Unexpected Roommate by Jackie Lau.

I just finished Remember Love by Mary Balogh, a Canadian romance novelist (though the book is set in Regency England). I love the author, but this book isn't her best.

I am probably one of the only people in the world to have not read The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood yet. I am chose to read it this month since Ms. Atwood is Canadian.

>47 lowelibrary: no you're not, I have just finished it for the first time.
It fits here for the reason you have indicated.

I read Obasan by Joy Kogawa. It was the novelized form of the author's grandmother's time spent in Canadian Japanese internment camp.

Finished In Between Dreams by Iman Verjee, written by a Canadian and placed in Canada. I've written a full review, but gorgeous as this book is, it's difficult to review, and deserves a massive CW for a 'secret' mentioned in the blurb which is, realistically, given away within a chapter or so of the beginning and the focus of the book. But, as I said, difficult to review--still a clear 4.5* read for me.

I have finished Still Life, the first book in the Armand Gamache series.

Like >46 christina_reads: above, I also read a historical romance by Mary Balogh and also found this wasn't one of her better books.

Five Little Indians / Michelle Good
3.5 stars

This book follows a few First Nations people who went to a residential school in B.C. when they were young. It follows them from the school, as they leave, and as they try to make lives for themselves after the traumas they experienced at the school. They wind in and out of each other’s lives.

Lucy is 16 when she is put on a bus to Vancouver from the school; luckily she knows Maisie who left the school a year earlier; unfortunately, she does get into a sticky situation before making it to Maisie’s place. Kenny managed to escape the school when he was younger, but he and Lucy had crushes on each other back then. Carla is a friend of Maisie’s. Howie gets into trouble with the law when he encounters “Brother” from the school as an adult.

I listened to the audio book. It was good. I wasn’t as interested in Carla’s story, so I missed a few things there. I also don’t think I liked Carla very much; she was very pushy. The book jumped between characters, and it often jumped forward large amounts of time, so at the start of some of the chapters I needed to try to figure out how many years later it was (and there was one bit with Carla that felt like the timing was out of sync with her character vs the rest of the story… but I’m not sure – that’s where I lost a bit of interest and missed a few things). And of course, there were memories of the school for all of them. There was at least one event that I think I missed altogether and when it was mentioned later in the book, I wondered what exactly had happened about that, so not sure if I missed it or it just wasn’t detailed or what happened there.

I'm listening to A Cold White Sun by Vicki Delany which is set in British Columbia.

COMPLETED Hands Like Clouds by Mark Zuehlke.

My review:

As coroner in Tofino on Vancouver Island, Elias McCann is called out to the body of an anti-logging activist found hanging from a tree. Although the police are eager to rule it a suicide, Elias is not convinced.

This book caught my eye because it is set near where a friend lives. The location descriptions are good, and the backstories of Elias and his girlfriend Vhanna are intriguing and well done, but the actual story is just plain dull. It wasn't so bad that I felt a DNF was justified, but by the time I got to the climactic drive through difficult terrain to foil the bad guy's plans, I just didn't care.

Is there a September thread yet?

>56 susanna.fraser: It's here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/343522.

I've read Lives of Girls and Women by Alice Munro which is by a Canadian author and the novel (her only novel) is set in rural Ontario in the 1940s. I was disappointed in it; I felt that Del Jordan, the main character, made some poor choices (both in people and in actions), and found her mother a very unappealing character. There were too many explicit sexual scenes for my taste.

>57 christina_reads: Thanks!

I read The Maid by Nita Prose and enjoyed it a lot.

Molly Gray is a maid at the luxurious Regency Grand Hotel. Although it is not mentioned, she is obviously on the autism spectrum. When she finds one of the guests murdered her reaction complicates matters and the investigation goes off-track when Molly is charged with murder. This was a charming story that captured my attention from the first page. The ending was sweet but I wouldn't want any other way.

>47 lowelibrary: I've not read it, either.

>29 rabbitprincess: haven't had a chance to read it yet, but hopefully I will, soon.

I read The Blue Castle, an adult novel by L.M. Montgomery.

I have finished Speaking from among the bones by Canadian author Alan Bradley.

I read Beggar Maid and Never Look Away.

Thanks to everyone who participated this month. My TBR list is even longer now!

In the better-late-than-never spot, I finished The Diviners by Margaret Laurence.