Category: Stop! Look! Listen!

To understand more about my Native heritage, I’ve been immersing in books about Aboriginal healing. I’ve found three sources, two non-fiction and one fiction, that are giving me a very full perspective. 

A recent read-turned-favourite is There’s No Such Thing As An Easy Job, written by Kikuko Tsumura and translated from the Japanese by Polly Barton. The narrator, burned out from her previous job, tries out a series of temp jobs with the caveat that they must be as undemanding as possible: “ideally, something along the lines of sitting all day in a chair”. Contrasted with our society’s focus on finding meaningful work, this premise is compelling from the start.

Amongst those who know me, I’m not known as someone who can supply music fit for every mood. If anything, I select a song list entirely against the tenor of the evening, the moving vehicle, or the dish pit. Slow sad burners when the night is ablaze and the inverse. Not to be contrarian, but more so oblivious.  

A book I was thoroughly taken with this year was Dominique Bernier-Cormier's poetry collection Entre Rive and Shore. As in his excellent first book, Correspondent, Bernier-Cormier draws together the micro-politics of his family and the macro-politics of world history to great emotional effect. Here, the Acadian Expulsion mirror's the author's personal search for a home between languages and cultures.

When I read Lisa Jarnot, it makes me want to write. So, given my frequent creative slumps, I keep Lisa’s collections close to my writing desk. I love all of them, but Ring of Fire is perhaps my favourite. It’s the kind of book you can either open up anywhere and plunge into for two minutes, or let yourself become engrossed, and reread the whole thing. In Lisa’s poetry, the banal and sacred seem to inhabit the same space, one sculpted out of language that is sometimes playful and childlike, sometimes serious and biblical, or even cosmic.

One of the best books I’ve read this year is D.A. Lockhart’s 2021 verse novel Bearmen Descend Upon Gimli, a virtuosic fusion of narrative, lyric, athletic, and mythological forms. Lockhart stages an epic Manitoban bonspiel as an allegory or roadmap for storytelling and sports as anticolonial resistance. As the Bearmen’s stones make “the world crack apart,” the collection is a story about literally remaking the world through curling — or maybe through stories about curling. 

The Master and Margarita is a novel by Soviet writer Mikhail Bulgakov, written in the Soviet Union between 1928 and 1940 during Stalin's regime. It's about Satan who pays a visit to the Soviet intellectuals when he learns they don't believe in him. His visit changes the lives and beliefs of many people. 

In 2010, a bunch of friends started an impossible book club, impossible as none of us—a wool-shop owner, an editor, a prof, a psychiatrist, a psychologist, a community program head, a Crown prosecutor, most parents or about to be—had time to read. Our meeting rule, more or less kept up: the book had to be published before 1960.

Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation by Kyo Maclear 

A few days ago – which will be many days ago by the time you read this – I watched robins, red-winged blackbirds, mallards, and a pair of swallows darting through shadows making them difficult to identify. Birds Art Life is a book I’ve read and re-read, in times of difficulty and in times of relative ease. It always brings me comfort.