Books on My List
I discovered the library and childhood changed. Books let me visit other lives, but what they really did was helped me discover my own. During the pandemic, I started reading for escape as well as enrichment, alternating soothing with bracing, comfort with, well, meaning and inspiration. I hate the moment when I finish a wonderful read and have to decide, “what next?” I breathe again when a new world closes around me. I can handle just about anything when I’m inside a strongly written book. Here are a few.
Z Generation: Into the Heart of Russia’s Fascist Youth
by Ian Garner (Hurst & Company, London)
Ian Garner’s riveting and alarming account of propaganda influencing young people in Russia, Z Generation: Into the Heart of Russia’s Fascist Youth. I have turned down every third page in this book. His interviewers tell staggering stories and Garner points to all the dangers of controlled media, including social media. I kept seeing danger signs for us in Canada. Ian is a Russian politics historian who was here at Queen’s but we’ve lost him, for the moment, to a university in Warsaw, Poland.
Gently to Nagasaki
By Joy Kogawa (caitlin Press)
Joy Kogawa’s shatteringly honest and beautiful memoir, Gently to Nagasaki. One of my favourite books ever, each page filled with insight, generosity, pain and kindness. The story of the Christian nuns in Nagasaki (which I didn’t know), the author’s brutal facing of her beloved father’s crimes, and the razor sharp writing.
The Heavy Bear
By Tim Bowling (Buckrider BOoks)
I love everything Tim Bowling writes, but particularly a delight is The Heavy Bear. A haunted college instructor, the riverbanks of Edmonton, a bear, and the ghost of silent film star Buster Keaton. Delicious and tender novel.
Worry Stones
by Joanna Lilley (Ronsdale press)
Worry Stones is a gorgeously written novel by Joanna Lilley, I stayed up late reading it and then treated myself to a chapter each morning. From the Canadian Arctic to Inverness, Scotland, through family tangles of illness, sacrifice, religion and comfort, I loved this book.
Lost in Canada: An Immigrant’s Second Thoughts by Lydia Perović (Sutherland House)
Lydia Perović: Lost in Canada: an immigrant’s second thoughts. This writer threw herself into Canada with optimism and vigour when she arrived from Montenegro in 1999. Like her brilliant articles and blog posts, her book excavates and examines how Canada (particularly our institutions) is losing itself – to conformity, to wanting to have American problems. Absolute page-turner and a really important read.
The Carnivore
by Mark Sinnett (ECW Press)
Mark Sinnett’s The Carnivore tells a story I’ve never seen in fiction – a ravaged Toronto during 1954’s Hurricane Hazel. I was born one year later and my first best friend was named after that storm. The novel parallels a struggling city with a disintegrating marriage. Mark is a real estate agent in Kingston, Ontario and writes stories for all the houses he represents. He also has a fun page-turner about cross-border drug smuggling in the Thousand Islands.
Hooked and Careen
by Carolyn Smart (Brick Books)
Carolyn Smart: Hooked and Careen. I reread both these stunning works of narrative poetry at least once a year. Hooked, the voices of hated women in history, and Careen, the brutal stories of the much romanticized Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow and their ‘gang’, outlaws in 1930’s America. A few years ago, my theatre class at Queen’s staged parts of Careen, researched and read about white poverty during the depression, and told their own stories in a show they titled “Why the hell not, we’re young!”
When I am awake at 3 a.m. in terror for the world, I sit on the couch and open a book. Then I can breathe. Through years of graduate school and then decades as a university professor, I listened to so many people say, “Sadly, I’m too busy to read anything not assigned” including English students! I never stopped reading for pleasure, and if I’m lucky I never will.
Julie Salverson is a nonfiction writer, playwright, editor, scholar and theatre animator. She is a fourth-generation Icelandic Canadian writer: her father, George, wrote early CBC radio and television drama and her grandmother Laura won two Governor General’s Awards (1937, 1939). Julie’s theatre, opera, books and essays embrace the relationship of imagination and foolish witness to risky stories and trauma. She works on atomic culture, community-engaged theatre and the place of the foolish witness in social, political and interpersonal generative relationships. Salverson offers resiliency and peer-support workshops to communities dealing with trauma and has many years of experience teaching and running workshops. Recent publications include the book When Words Sing: Seven Canadian Libretti (Playwrights Canada Press, 2021) and Lines of Flight: An Atomic Memoir (Wolsak & Wynn, 2016). jsalverson.wordpress.com.
