Well, what does one say about Joseph Boyden’s The Orenda?
I read the book recently, after it won this year’s Canada Reads competition in which five books and their defenders faced off to eliminate and leave standing “one novel that could change Canada.” Reviews of The Orenda have been laudatory; apparently there was a “gasp” when it didn’t make the Giller Prize shortlist. It has received sharp criticism as well, especially from aborginal reviewers like Hayden King. Continue reading
I’m thinking a lot about the act of reading these days. Thinking that it depends on the stage one’s in.
From childhood’s diving into whatever’s available, hour after hour of sheer delight, the world opening to me… through the required reading of high school and post-secondary education, with extracurricular books riding waves of deep longing and the quest to figure life out… through the busy middle years of children and work, when books seemed especially memorable and piercing, perhaps because time for them was rarer… through the ravenous reading in an emptying nest, as if to finally catch up with the Great Unread, when I began a book log to keep track and push myself… Continue reading
At lunch with three friends, the conversation turned to books. Sally proposed that what we read often comes to us serendipitously. Later, the four of us exchanged a string of emails. Sarah sent us an essay by Moyra Davey called “The Problem of Reading” which opens with the author’s confession that “what to read” is a “recurring dilemma” in her life. She pictures a woman moving about the house among shelves of books, many unread, picking up one for a few pages, then another.
“It is not just a question of which book will absorb her,” she writes, “but rather, which book, in a nearly cosmic sense, will choose her….” Continue reading
Borrowing Bones 