The Biblio File
February 13, 2023
Have you ever gone on a blind date with a book? Why not try a new author or genre on Valentine’s Day? Never read sci-fi? Haven’t tried historical fiction? Break out of your comfort zone and give something new a try. Let us know how your date went!
The Canada Reads shortlist has been announced! The debates will take place March 27-30, 2023.
Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands by Kate Beaton, is an autobiographical graphic novel that recounts her time spent working in the Alberta oil sands. With the goal of paying off her student loans, Beaton leaves her tight-knit seaside Nova Scotia community and heads west, where she encounters harsh realities, including the everyday trauma that no one discusses. Beaton draws colossal machinery and mammoth vehicles set against a sublime Albertan backdrop of wildlife, northern lights, and boreal forest. This is an untold story of Canada: a country that prides itself on its egalitarian ethos and natural beauty while simultaneously exploiting both the riches of its land and the humanity of its people.
In the novel Greenwood by Michael Christie it’s the year 2038 and most of the world has suffered from an environmental collapse. Jacinda (Jake) Greenwood is a storyteller and a liar, an overqualified tour guide babysitting ultra-rich-eco-tourists in one of the world’s last remaining forests. It’s 2008 and Liam Greenwood is a carpenter, sprawled on his back after a workplace fall and facing the possibility of his own death. It’s 1974 and Willow Greenwood is just out of jail for one of her environmental protests: attempts at atonement for the sins of her father’s once vast and rapacious timber empire. It’s 1934 and Everett Greenwood is a Depression-era drifter who saves an abandoned infant, only to find himself tangled up in the web of a crime, secrets, and betrayal that will cling to his family for decades. And throughout, there are trees: a steady, silent pulse, working as a guiding metaphor for withering, weathering, and survival.
In Hotline by Dimitri Nasrallah it’s 1986 and Muna Heddad and her son have moved to Montreal, leaving behind a civil war filled with bad memories in Lebanon. She had plans to find work as a French teacher, but no one in Quebec trusts her to teach the language. She needs to start making money, and fast. The only work Muna can find is at a weight-loss center as a hotline operator. These strangers have so much to say about their challenges, from marriages gone bad to personal inadequacies. Although her life in Canada is filled with invisible barriers, Muna is privy to her clients’ deepest secrets.
Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia is a horror novel set in 1950s Mexico. It tells the story of a young woman named Noemí who is called by her cousin to save her from doom in her countryside home, the mysterious and alluring High Place. Noemí doesn’t know much about the house, the region or her cousin’s mysterious new husband, but she’s determined to solve this mystery and save her cousin — whatever it takes.
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel is a dystopian novel that takes place on an Earth undone by disease, following the interconnected lives of several characters — actors, artists and those closest to them — before and after the plague. One travels the wasteland performing Shakespearean plays with a troupe, while another attempts to build community at an abandoned airport and another amasses followers for a dangerous cause.