(No posts in March 2024: lots of reading, but too much non-blog writing for the energy to be left over for blogging. I'll catch up soon. In theory.) The book club is reading David Grann's The Wager this month (breathlessly subtitled A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder), in the same cycle for some reason as Campbell & Chellel's Dead in the Water: A True Story of Hijacking, Murder, and a Global Maritime Conspiracy. Are we looking to shift our activities away from books to boats? Not likely to go well, based on these selections, even if we do have a ship's engineer in the group, but who k ..read more

 Two refrains run through Theresa Kishkan’s intimate novel Sisters of Grass, two little phrases that keep reverberating across the pages and that ought to keep the reader reflecting on the passage of time, both inside the novel and in their own lives: “I have dreamed of a girl,” and versions of “In such ways is the world remembered.” It’s a novel of imagination, Sisters of Grass, a novel of memory, that dramatizes in small ways and small lives the ways that readers and writers conjure up whole worlds out of nothing—except that somehow, and to the surprise of no one who’s ever read Theresa ..read more

Tl;dr: this sensibly proportioned little volume does exactly the job Lewis wants it to, even if it’s not the job I wanted it to do, and readers looking for a small story about trees (and/or someone who comes to really, really appreciate trees) should be very happy with Tracking Giants. Dear reader, I promise that I’ll get to Amanda Lewis’s Tracking Giants: Big Trees, Tiny Triumphs, and Misadventures in the Forest eventually in this … essay? perambulation? tangle? Whatever it is that I’ve ended up writing, and it's the longest post to date among the 700-plus here at Book Addiction HQ, it was m ..read more

I picked up Bruce Burrows’ The River Killers several years ago, though I’m no longer sure where or when. The “why,” though, is clear: it’s hardcore West Coast writing, by a writer who’s so West Coast that he probably … well, make up your own proverb. But I didn’t start reading it at the time, partly because it would’ve arrived during a years-long busy cycle for me, but also because I saw warning signs. For some readers, ones with fishing backgrounds, the ones that Burrows would actually want as readers, they might be badges of honour, but….. “To the hardworking, dedicated people at DFO [Cana ..read more

It’s not what I expected, Chip Zdarsky’s Public Domain: Volume One, but I don’t read enough graphica for my expectations to be at all trustworthy. Reviewers have generally been enthusiastic about this graphic novel, but readers (if one judges from Reddit) have been more equivocal. Who to trust? Superficially, Public Domain is about the long after-effects of cartoonist / artist Syd Dallas’ career drawing the comics for the world’s most popular character, Domain, now at the centre of multiple movies. (They’re from Singular Comics, so naturally the movies take place in the SCU, the current one be ..read more

1991, that's how long ago Elmore Leonard’s Maximum Bob was published. But I was in university then, which means it’s basically the present as far as my memories are concerned. You can’t convince me, sorry, that it has been 33 years since we first heard REM’s “Losing My Religion”; EMF’s “Unbelievable”; Massive Attack’s “Unfinished Sympathy” (from the amazing Blue Lines); “Right Here, Right Now” by the inimitable tho often-imitated Jesus Jones; Bonnie Raitt’s timeless “Something to Talk About” and “I Can’t Make You Love Me”; Lenny Kravitz’ “It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over”; Pearl Jam’s “Black”; and ..read more

 When I last visited Portland, fourteen years ago, I really enjoyed my visit to the Oregon Historical Museum. Their exhibits did a great job of telling the settler story without minimizing the genocidal practices that made possible the fairly rapid settlement of Oregon (cf the Vancouver Island Local History Society that I’ve been involved with), and I ended up buying a few books from them before throwing open my wallet at Powell’s. Perhaps strangely, it took this long for me to get back to one of my purchases from that trip, S.L. Stoner’s Timber Beasts, which she helpfully subtitles A Sag ..read more

(Barely a review: I get to the novel only eventually, after what's almost certainly an unhelpfully long prelude about race, BC vs Canada, and growing up where racial difference meant white vs Indigenous: and almost entirely Secwepemc/Shuswap, at that!) Sometimes I forget how severely and purposefully I’ve limited (though softly) my sense of Canadianness. Re-reading something like David Chariandy’s Soucouyant brings home, in all kinds of ways, the consequences and rhythms of this process. It’s a remarkable novel, deservedly celebrated, and I’m so pleased that it has been optioned for a possible ..read more

 I don’t blame reviewers of Aaron Shepard’s debut novel, When Is A Man, for not quite getting it, but even when they liked the novel, they didn’t get it. Or maybe they didn’t get all of it, or maybe their editors wouldn’t let them keep writing? The surface of When Is A Man is rich enough, distracting enough, that a reader can think that that’s also the core of the novel. Absolutely, it’s tempting to lionize its unsparing portrait of a young man (Ed.—he’s in his 30s, so…?) (Auth.—like I said, young) who has developed prostate cancer and has survived only via major surgical intervention. If ..read more

Look: Joe Garner was a terrible writer, and he may have been worse when it came to stretching the truth, but the fact of the matter is that hardly anybody else wrote down the stories that would’ve intersected with the stories he wrote down. I’m seething the whole time I’m reading his books, but damn it, and damn him as well, Joe Garner’s Never Chop Your Rope: A Story of British Columbia Logging and the People Who Logged is basically irreplaceable. Not my pic: thanks, Ebay seller! Broken into 23 chapters, each one named after someone from the logging industry that Garner worked wi ..read more