What to Read After the Orenda and Three Day Road?

What to Read After The Orenda and Three Day Road?

Novels about FIRST NATIONS

Kiss of the Fur Queen, by Tompson Highway. This is not just my favourite First Nations book, it's one of my favourite books of all time.

"Tomson Highway's prose is beautiful, lyrical... Emotionally complex, witty, symphonic and sad, Kiss of the Fur Queen is a remarkable novel, filled with blood and guts, life and love." —The Vancouver Sun

Green Grass, Running Water, Thomas King. Actually, everything I've read by him has been really, really good. He recently won the Governor General's Award for his latest book,The Back of the Turtle.

















What I loved about Green Grass, Running Water and The Kiss of the Fur Queen is that although they tackled difficult aspects of life today for indigenous Canadians, both novels also had very funny aspects (something that was entirely lacking in the Joseph Boyden novels, I thought)

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WWI Novels and Memoirs

I've read a bunch of really good WWI novels and memoirs. Here are my favourites:

Pat Barker's Regeneration Trilogy: Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, and The Ghost Road, the last which won the Booker Prize. Personally, I think that the award was meant to cover all three books of the trilogy.

The Regeneration Trilogy is interesting because it deals with the effects of the war on the soldiers, rather than talking about their exploits in battles. (Maybe these novels focus on the psychological over the physical because they are written by a woman?)

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The Wars, by Timothy Findlay. Winner of the Governor General's Award.

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Good-bye to All That, by Robert Graves. Probably my all-time favourite WWI book, but that might be because it was my first.

 "The quintessential memoir of the generation of Englishmen who suffered in World War I is among the bitterest autobiographies ever written. Robert Graves's stripped-to-the-bone prose seethes with contempt for his class, his country, his military superiors, and the civilians who mindlessly cheered the carnage from the safety of home. His portrait of the stupidity and petty cruelties endemic in England's elite schools is almost as scathing as his depiction of trench warfare. Nothing could equal Graves's bone-chilling litany of meaningless death, horrific encounters with gruesomely decaying corpses, and even more appalling confrontations with the callousness and arrogance of the military command. Yet this scarifying book is consistently enthralling. Graves is a superb storyteller, and there's clearly something liberating about burning all your bridges at 34 (his age when Good-Bye to All That was first published in 1929). He conveys that feeling of exhilaration to his readers in a pell-mell rush of words that remains supremely lucid. Better known as a poet, historical novelist, and critic, Graves in this one work seems more like an English Hemingway, paring his prose to the minimum and eschewing all editorializing because it would bring him down to the level of the phrase- and war-mongers he despises." --Wendy Smith

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All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque. Probably the most famous WWI novel of all, this one was written by a former German soldier. Interesting how similar his story is to the soldiers fighting on our side.

Wab Kinew & Stephoen Lewis on The Orenda II

http://www.cbc.ca/player/Radio/Canada+Reads/ID/2440240230/

Another link to the Wab Kinew & Stephen Lewis discussion of THE ORENDA (I'm getting a temporary off line message at the other link right now).

Reading literary fiction improves empathy, study finds

http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/oct/08/literary-fiction-improves-empathy-study

Excerpts:

New research shows works by writers such as Charles Dickens and Téa Obreht sharpen our ability to understand others' emotions – more than thrillers or romance novels . . .

Have you ever felt that reading a good book makes you better able to connect with your fellow human beings? If so, the results of a new scientific study back you up, but only if your reading material is literary fiction – pulp fiction or non-fiction will not do.

Psychologists David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano, at the New School for Social Research in New York, have proved that reading literary fiction enhances the ability to detect and understand other people's emotions, a crucial skill in navigating complex social relationships.

In a series of five experiments, 1,000 participants were randomly assigned texts to read, either extracts of popular fiction such as bestseller Danielle Steel's The Sins of the Mother and Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, or more literary texts, such as Orange-winner The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht, Don DeLillo's "The Runner", from his collection The Angel Esmeralda, or work by Anton Chekhov.

The pair then used a variety of Theory of Mind techniques to measure how accurately the participants could identify emotions in others. Scores were consistently higher for those who had read literary fiction than for those with popular fiction or non-fiction texts.
"What great writers do is to turn you into the writer. In literary fiction, the incompleteness of the characters turns your mind to trying to understand the minds of others," said Kidd.

Colin Firth on reading

I love this because it's so true! (and also, I have a weakness for good looking intellectual men)

Three Day Road - interview with the author

A 10 minute interview where Joseph Boyden discusses his first novel:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xcBZqKBvdQM

Wab Kinew and Stephen Lewis debate torture in The Orenda

http://www.cbc.ca/books/canadareads/2014/03/wab-and-stephen-debate-torture-in-the-orenda.html

Click the above link to go to the Canada Reads Website. Click on the picture there to watch the six minute debate. The entire Canada Reads 2014 program is available to watch on that site if you want to see more. (Sorry I couldn't embed the video in this blog--I tried the five ways that I know and none of them worked. I'm sure there is a way, but I don't have time to explore it. Clicking through works fine.)

Critical Review of Joseph Boyden’s “The Orenda”: A Timeless, Classic Colonial Alibi

 A meaty review:  http://www.muskratmagazine.com/home/node/192#.VFUO5cnYeOt