February Books of the Month

March 20, 2020 by Christina

February feels like a lifetime ago, doesn’t it? I know it was a busy month for me because my calendar is packed with book club meetings, dinner plans with friends, and an introduction to quilting class on Sundays. Yet, from the vantage point of mid-March, it feels unimaginably footloose and fancy free. What did I do when I could go and do whatever I wanted? Well, what I did was read an astonishing 17 books during this month thanks in […]

Categories: 2020 Reads, Amish, Animals, Audiobook, Awards and Prizes, Book Club, Canada, Caribbean, Classics, Classics Club, Crime, Europe, Feminism, Fiction, Food, Indigenious Peoples, Juvenile, LGBTQA+, Mountain West, Nonfiction, North America, Persephone Books, ReadDiverse, Religion, Travel, United Kingdom, United States, Women's Prize • Tags: A. J. Finn, Adam Darlin, Audre Lorde, Becky Ohlsen, Brendan Sainsbury, Catherine Bodry, Chris Chalk, Christopher Ketcham, Coco Morante, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Edwidge Danticat, Jesmyn Ward, Jia Tolentino, John Lee, Jon Krakauer, Kamila Shamsie, Kevin Harrison Jr, L. M. Montgomery, Linda Castillo, Marghanita Laski, Richard Thomas, Rutina Wesley, Shelly Frasier, Steven Higashide, Susan O'Malley, Sy Montgomery

January Books of the Month

February 7, 2020 by Christina

Whenever I am in Montana, I tend to go dark across social media, focusing on spending time with family and being outdoors over writing blog posts, responding to emails, or posting to Instagram. (I deleted Facebook in August 2019 followed by Twitter the next month.) I planned to return to blogging once my vacation ended. Then, work threw my team and I through another re-organization, and I was too mentally scrambled to organize my bookish thoughts in coherent ones. I’m really […]

Categories: 2020 Reads, Asia, Audiobook, Canada, Cartography, Chunkster, Classics, Crime, Europe, Fiction, Germany, Iceland, Icelandic, Indigenious Peoples, Japanese, Mexico, Mountain West, Nonfiction, North America, Persephone Books, ReadDiverse, Reread, South America, Translated, United Kingdom, United States • Tags: Andrew Cauthery, Anna Funder, Björg Árnadóttir, C.J. Box, Cathy O'Neil, Charles C. Mann, Guðmundur Andri Thorsson, Kaoru Mori, L. M. Montgomery, Monica Dickens, Naomi Klein, Ta-Nehisi Coates

Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien

September 11, 2019 by Christina

Fiction – Kindle edition. W.W. Norton & Company, 2016. 474 pgs. Purchased.  Marie’s father committed suicide in Hong Kong in the days after the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre — duel sins referred to only in hushed tones. Ten-year-old Marie is unsure how she is supposed to grieve for the father than abandoned her and her mother back in Vancouver months before the protests were brutally ended. And her distance from mainland China leaves her unsure as to why her father […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Asia, Awards and Prizes, Canada, China, Chunkster, Fiction, Giller Prize, North America, ReadDiverse, Women's Prize • Tags: Madeleine Thien

Kings of the Yukon by Adam Weymouth

May 10, 2019 by Christina

Nonfiction – print. Little, Brown and Company, 2018. 288 pgs. Library copy. Subtitled “One Summer Paddling Across the Far North”, Weymouth’s memoir covers the fourth months he spent canoeing the Yukon River from Canada’s Yukon Territory through Alaska to the Bering Sea. The Yukon is 2,000 miles long, the longest free-flowing river in the United States and the longest salmon run in the world. Each summer, king salmon (known as Chinook in Canada) migrate the distance of the Yukon to […]

Categories: 2019 Reads, Canada, Food, Indigenious Peoples, Nonfiction, North America, United States • Tags: Adam Weymouth

When Calls the Heart by Janette Oke

April 25, 2018 by Christina

Fiction — Kindle edition. Bethany House, 2005. Originally published 1983. 228 pgs. Library copy. One of my (not so) guilty pleasures these days is watching the television show ‘When Calls the Heart’ on the Hallmark Channel. The show is sweet and kind, and any anguishing problem is solved by the end of the ten episode season — if not in one episode. Since the show has been such a nice break from the police procedural or dramas I normally watch, […]

Categories: 2018 Reads, Canada, Fiction, North America • Tags: Janette Oke

Fifteen Dogs by André Alexis

December 8, 2015 by Christina

Fiction — print. Coach House Books, 2015. 171 pgs. Library copy. In this imaginative, little book, the Greek gods Hermes and Apollo visit a dog kennel near Toronto and gift the fifteen dogs there with consciousness. The two have wagered a bet over whether or not intelligence — or, maybe more appropriately,  awareness of one’s place in society outside the insular pack — makes humans happier than other beings. If one of these fifteen dogs gifted with human intelligence dies […]

Categories: 2015 Reads, Animals, Canada, Fiction, Giller Prize, North America • Tags: André Alexis

Tell by Frances Itani

January 29, 2015 by Christina

Fiction — print. Black Cat, 2014. 321 pgs. Purchased. Shortlisted for the 2014 Giller Prize, Itani’s novel is set in a small Canadian village named Deseronto in Ontario following the Great War and reintroduces readers to the characters first presented in her 2003 novel, Deafening. That novel, apparently, focused on a deaf woman named Grania and her sister Tress (I haven’t read the novel); this novel focuses on Tress’ partner, Kenan, and the impact his post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD, or […]

Categories: 2015 Reads, Canada, Fiction, Giller Prize, North America • Tags: Frances Itani

All My Puny Sorrows by Miriam Toews

December 29, 2014 by Christina

Fiction — print. McSweeney’s, 2014. 330 pgs. Library copy. Raised in a Mennonite household haunted by remembers of religious persecution in Russia, Elfrieda and Yolandi are expected to conform to particular expectations for their life and live in a community where people gossip and whisper about the nonconformists. Elfrieda, known as Elf to her family, is a progeny at the piano offering her an opportunity to escape from the insular community and her sister, known as Yoli, an example of […]

Categories: 2014 Reads, Canada, Fiction, Giller Prize, North America • Tags: Miriam Toews

The Girl Who Was Saturday Night by Heather O’Neill

October 16, 2014 by Christina

Fiction — print. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. 416 pgs. Library copy. Set against the backdrop of the 1995 Quebec referendum for national sovereignty, O’Neill’s novel introduces readers to the Tremblay family, a colorful cast of characters whose identities are entwined with the independence movement by a documentary produced about their lives during the first referendum in 1980. Told through the eyes of nineteen-year-old Nouschka, the novel follows her as she returns to school after dropping out at sixteen with her twin […]

Categories: 2014 Reads, Canada, Fiction, Giller Prize, North America • Tags: Heather O’Neill

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

May 26, 2014 by Christina

Fiction — audiobook. Read by Ruth Ozeki. Penguin Audio, 2013. 14.7 hours. Library copy. In Tokyo, sixteen-year-old Nao has decided there’s only one escape from her aching loneliness and her classmates’ bullying. But before she ends it all, Nao plans to document the life of her great-grandmother, a Buddhist nun who’s lived more than a century. A diary is Nao’s only solace—and will touch lives in a ways she can scarcely imagine. Across the Pacific, a novelist named Ruth lives […]

Categories: 2014 Reads, Asia, Audiobook, Book Club, Canada, Fiction, Japan, North America • Tags: Ruth Ozeki

Mark of the Grizzly by Scott McMillion

June 5, 2013 by Christina

Nonfiction — print. Falcon Publishing, 1998. 252 pgs.  Borrowed from my mother. Subtitled “True Stories of Recent Bear Attacks and the Hard Lessons Learned”, this book examines a series of grizzly encounters (I loathe to use the word “attacks”) to provide lessons on how to behave in bear country for visitors and attempts to piece together a more in-depth explanation of bear behavior. Incidentally, however, I was quite happy to be reading this one on the plane away from bear […]

Categories: 2013 Reads, Animals, Canada, Mountain West, Nonfiction, North America, United States • Tags: Scott McMillion

Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

July 13, 2011 by Christina

In need of help on their farm, siblings Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert send word to a friend to fetch a boy from the orphanage. Instead, they were sent a freckle-faced, redhead eleven-year-old girl with a very active imagination named Anne (spelled with an e, please). Marilla is set on sending Anne Shirley back to the orphanage the next morning, but this charming young girl desperately wants to stay at Green Gables with Marilla and her brother and promises to keep […]

Categories: 2011 Reads, Canada, Classics, Fiction, Juvenile, North America • Tags: L. M. Montgomery