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.