Reviews and Comments

Just a stunning account of the so-called Oka Crisis of 1990, told in the form of a dialogue between a settler academic, Sean Carleton, and Katsi'tsakwas Ellen Gabriel, one of the chief spokespeople in the negotiations with the state, first with the SQ and then, ultimately, the Canadian army. The description of the standoff leads into a wider discussion including Gabriel's work with Quebec Native Women, and then more recent environmental actions such as that involving the Wet'suwet'en.

I came here off the back of that CBS interview, but was surprised to see how the book went. It's really three quite separate essays, held together by a common theme of the stories we tell ourselves, and how important writing and story telling are. The third essay has obviously attracted the most attention and, while it's definitely thought-provoking, I think it really suffers from being too short -- perhaps it should have been a book on its own? One of the principal points of the essay is that we really need more Palestinian voices in the media. The stories we're told matter as they construct our reality.

Interesting set of essays on the relationship between Canada and Palestine, both in terms of foreign policy but also the experience of Palestinian-Canadians. Particularly liked the chapter on the different Palestinian organizations in Ottawa.

Bit of a kitchen sink feeling to this, as it covers in (sometimes excruciating) detail the history of Dracula, first the novel and then the various stage and film adaptations. Some interesting highlights, such as a description of where the title of 'Nosferatu' came from, but too much of the book felt like it was bogged down in the back and forth of negotiations over stage and film rights.

I was aware that Trudeau's Liberals had done precious little to improve on the dismal environmental performance of the Harper government, but Engler's book covers the many other ways that the Liberals created the illusion of being more progressive, while largely continuing (or, in some cases, worsening) Canada's foreign policy. The same underlying principle -- support authoritarian governments as long as they represent Canadian/US interests, and especially support the mining sector -- was just given a more appealing face.

Unfortunately this isn't really what I was looking for. Good on narrative, but much weaker on analysis.

I may have spent far, far too much time down the old-fashioned murder mystery rabbit hole when my kids were little, absorbing Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and Ngaio Marsh, but this didn't really seem to resemble a murder mystery as I'd recognize it. A pleasant enough medieval story, but the murder seemed a bit incidental (and yes, I realize it does sound a bit weird to complain about a story being insufficiently murder-ey, but it feels a bit like a failure of advertising :) ).

TBH I've come to question the sense of rating an anthology. After all, if I loved every story, wouldn't that simply mean a perfect overlap between my taste and that of the editor? I read this because it contains a story by Andrew Joseph White, and that certainly didn't disappoint. Although a number of other stories didn't really do anything for me, I have discovered a number of new writers I'd like to read more by (Jose Pablo Iriarte, Tori Curtis, Kathryn DeFazio, and Kylie Ariel Bemis), plus the introduction listed a number of interesting other venues for stories.

Provides a remarkably readable history of communism, tracing its origins in the French Revolution and continuing to almost the present day. Very detailed consideration of the internal workings of pretty much any country with a significant communist presence in the last 150 years, only slightly marred by a lack of context -- but then maybe the book would have been even more of a monster than it already was.

Genuinely just blown away by this. Mixture of creepy and gory that slightly belies the YA designation, but I fell for the characters so hard.

In-depth examination of the increasing concentration of the Canadian media landscape (speaking here from a city where I have the 'choice' of five daily newspapers, four of which are owned by Postmedia...). Covers the process by which Postmedia has gradually bought up more and more newspapers, closing many of them, and shifting the increasingly-centralized editorial take to the right. Also covers the complicated financial structure of Postmedia and its ownership by various, mostly US-based, hedge funds and other opaque financial institutions. Because the book is so new, it's also able to cover the various forms of subsidy provided by the Liberal government, and how they've often ended up just propping up the debt payments of the hedge funds, while being inaccessible to smaller independent news outlets. Not a cheery read, but useful in understanding the way Canada's democracy is going...

Not quite as good as Network Effect, perhaps because ART is less involved this time. The first couple of chapters also confused me a bit -- I felt like I'd been dropped into the middle of a book and had missed the build-up -- but once I got past that it was a ton of fun.

The first half of the book consists of pretty much a chapter per century, starting with the original sources and then walking through Geoffrey of Monmouth, Chretien de Troyes, Malory, and so on. This part seemed consistently excellent, to me. The second half is much more patchy, consisting of chapters on different themes in Arthurian literature, such as the relationship between Christianity and magic or the attempt to map the Arthurian legend onto the real geography of Britain. Some chapters are really interesting and others... less so.

Such a fun read! Action-packed, almost breathlessly so, with much less of the exposition that I think slowed down the later novellas, still plenty of humour, but also deeper relationship-building. Murderbot (aka 'SecUnit', when it wants to be less, I don't know, murderey) remains easily the most relatable character in today's fiction.